Leave It to Beaver Families, or Rodent Family Values
Home is where they learn the vital skill of grooming. Mutual grooming is an important daily ritual among beavers that reinforces their social ties while it keeps their fur clean and waterproof. For aquatic mammals who spend most of their lives in water, clean, waterproof fur is a matter of life or death.
Much of the beavers' renowned construction and engineering skills are learned as well. The little kits learn how to put together a strong structure by watching, and occasionally "helping" their parents and older siblings repair the home.
Even diving under water long enough to swim below the lodge to the entrance has to be learned by observing older family members. Dorothy Richards actually had to teach one hapless kit who'd been separated from his family how to dive before he was able to return to his home lodge and reunite with his family.
But a parent beaver's childrearing duties don't stop when the little ones finally emerge from the lodge. When Ryden observed her beaver family's new kits enter the pond for the first time, the entire extended family converged to usher the tykes around and provide convenient backs for them to rest on when they tired. A parent or older sibling was always available to act as chaperone until the kits had become completely familiar with the pond. Two older children who'd already moved on to build their own lodge actually returned to participate in this joyful family experience.
The new kits have a few weeks of this idyllic life, but soon they start tagging along with mom and pop to learn the beaver family trade. Everybody participates in the communal beaver family, working, eating, playing and living together in the small aquatic ecosystem they've created for themselves.
You can order Hope Ryden's Lily Pond: Four Years with a Beaver Family and Dorothy Richards and Hope Sawyer Buyukmihci's Beaversprite from amazon.com. Or visit Dorothy Richards' web site, Beavers, Wetlands & Wildlife to learn more about her conservation work with beavers. For a very funny story of unauthorized beaver dam-building clashing with human bureaucracy, check out the Spring Pond Beavers.
Read more about families, dads in particular, in articles written especially for Father's Day by the editors at Suite101.com. Happy Father's Day from Suite101.com!
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