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Beaver Dam Beaver Dam. The beaver were all but extinct in New England up until the turn of the last century. Oddly enough, the Great Depression was a tremendous boon to a lot of wildlife, when farms when bust, the forests had been overlogged and no longer worth exploiting, and a withdrawl from overused lands. The beaver and other wildlife moved back in with the regrowth. They're still up here, blocking streams and creating new ponds. This will drown out a stand of trees below waterline, after the roots suffocate. The standing timber will be homes to any number of birds until they fall into the muck. The pond will silt in, or the dam will fail or the beaver will move on for reasons of their own. Grasses and pioneer species re-establish into a marsh, a peak bog, a meadow, then the transition forest. All because of that green mound of sticks 100 feet away in the middle of the pond -- and the architect just this side and to the left -- sticking his head out to get a better look at me. Pumping up the last hill for the day, an hour before sunset, we were at a locked warming hut atop a ski slope. Well, it was almost locked. I won't say how we got in or which one of us managed it, but we were in (and we didn't break anything).