Beaver Moon
By Rebecca Fanning
This time last year, while enjoying a brief respite between thesis writing and thesis defense, I was in attendance at Robinson Design Engineers’ annual retreat under the Beaver Moon. I’ve had the honor of attending two RDE retreats, bookends of a graduate research internship. The first year I took part, our campfire was visited by none other than the American beaver, (Castor canadensis), documented in the photograph below under Nolan Williams’ headlamp. Remarkable it should have found us, since RDE had recently adopted its image as a secondary logo – a creative license that designer Jay Fletcher made without one word from any of us as to the significance of this creature to RDE’s work.
A visitor at RDE’s retreat | Image: Nolan Williams
RDE logo featuring C. canadensis by Jay Fletcher
It is perhaps ironic to some that water resource engineers like RDE would proudly bear this emblem: a tree, a mountain stream, and a beaver in the middle. Widely considered a nuisance pest, beavers fell trees, plug culverts, convert rushing water to sluggish wetland meadows, flooding all sorts of critical infrastructure, and for centuries they have evaded the United States’ best efforts at extirpation.
The beaver’s innate anxiety at the sound of rushing water and all the industrious efforts it has taken over generations to slow the flow of water offers a lesson us humans should adapt to adopt. Formerly ubiquitous beaver dams, small and large, created frequent and chaotic natural disturbance regimes that native plants and animals have coevolved to depend on. Should a critical piece of a beaver dam break off in a flood, compromising the structural integrity of the whole, the diligent caretakers rush in to repair, shore up, and reduce the risk of future failures by building in an upstream direction, creating resilient cascading systems of distributed water management. The construction activities of beaver are as flexible as the materials they use and are forever a work in progress. The Beaver Moon reminds us that to live with water, we must change the way we live, and we must work at it with considerable forbearance.
Last Beaver Moon, my graduate degree coursework at the College of Charleston was being conducted exclusively online, and so, too, were thesis defense presentations. Knowing how it feels to give a one-hour talk to a mute, virtual room, my sympathetic research colleagues determined that the annual RDE retreat would commence loudly. I was surprised by a carol of sorts to the tune of Sounds of Silence, with words chock full of inside jokes, interrupted by uncontrollable laughter, and culminating in a toast to my recent accomplishment of “10,000 pages maybe more”. As grateful as I felt then and feel now for the opportunity to work with and learn from these fine folks, I received their own sincere gratitude in response for the research I did and the insights I brought to them. The process of transformation was reciprocal, and the graduate degree I obtained was a shallow watermark compared to the flood of information I researched with RDE’s help.
What I investigated, wrote, and later presented, Legacies & Trajectories to Inform Piedmont Stream Restoration, was in service to one of RDE’s trickier project sites: a small watershed in the Piedmont of South Carolina, now held in conservation easement, that is torn apart by deep gullies and crisscrossed by old logging roads and ATV trails. What RDE proposes to do to restore the streams of this site remains unprecedented in the state of South Carolina. Their design mimics the work of the Carolina beaver (Castor canadensis carolinensis), and tempers stream power and erosive flows with simple, messy log structures, a far cry from the designs promoted by the National Engineering Handbook 654 for stream restoration. Essentially, RDE took the work of the beaver and gave it an official engineer’s stamp of expert approval. You’ll have to stay tuned for what comes from this approach.
What better occasion than a Beaver Moon for RDE’s retreat to assess the past year's work and make adjustments for the year ahead? Like a series of beaver dams bolstered in an upstream direction, RDE's work is never complete. This Beaver Moon, I encourage you not to submit to small failures, but to assume responsibility for what is within your power to change. And change it.
The Beaver Moon | Image: jplenio