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BEAVER

BEAVER

of General Gillmore and Admiral Dahlgren in 1863. In 1864 he successfully resisted General Butler, and held Petersburg against Grant's attack until the arrival of General Lee. He later had the task of resting General Sherman's march to the sea. After the war he became president of the New Orleans and Mississippi Railroad, and in 1878 was made general manager of the Louisiana Lottery Company. He died near New Orleans, February 20, 1893.

Beaver, a gnawing animal of very interesting habits, related to squirrels, but living in the water. Beavers live in Europe, Asia and North America, although there is believed to be only one kind. They are about two feet long, one foot high, and weigh from forty-five to sixty pounds. The beaver is, therefore, one of the largest and heaviest of the gnawers. It has a very unusual tail, o v a 1, flat and scaly, about ten, inches long and three inches wide. The rest of the body is covered by fur of two kinds: a soft, thick, gray under-fur, overlaid with polished and glistening chestnut-brown hairs. The fur is one of the most valuable furs of commerce.

Formerly, this animal was distributed through the wooded part of the northern hemisphere, but it has been hunted till it is almost exterminated in settled portions. In the United States it is scarcely found east of the Mississippi; occasional colonies are known, however, in Maine, Virginia, and a few other places. Though numbers exist in Siberia, the beaver is now rare in the Old World.

The beaver feeds mainly on bark of trees (willow,poplar, birch, etc.), roots, buds and leaves. It gnaws down trees not only for constructing dams and houses, but to get the finer branches and twigs for food. The front teeth are remarkably large, and of deep orange color on the outside. They are like the front teeth of the fsquirrels, rabbits and other gnawing animals, hard in front and softer behind, so that by use they get worn to chisel edges. With these teeth they gnaw through trees as large as nine feet in circumference. Their hind feet are webbed and the flattened tail serves as a sculling oar and rudder, which makes them splendid swimmers and divers. They can remain two minutes under water. They are social animals; a family of several members usually live in one house; and sometimes a large number of families collect together in a community. Usually there axe four young ones at a Dirthu The young

beavers leave home in their third summer and set up new households, and when communities become too large for comfortable living, an emigration takes place. Once in a while a solitary old bachelor is found, a recluse living alone in his burrow.

Their habits are remarkable; they usually work at night, and so diligently, that " working like a beaver" has become a common saying. They build houses, lodges and dams in forest brook, well-concealed from haunts of man. The simplest form of house is merely a burrow opening under water. The lodges are more elaborate and are of three kinds: the island-lodge, built on a small island in a pond; the lodge built on the banks of streams and ponds; and the lake-lodge on the sloping shores of lakes, with a considerable portion of the hut out of water. A description of one of the island-lodges will be sufficient: It is an oven-shaped house of sticks, grass and moss woven together and plastered with mud, so strong as to protect the inhabitants from beasts of prey. The room inside may measure eight feet in diameter and two or three feet in height, and the floor is carpeted with bark, grass and wood chips. There are two entrances, both underneath; one is straight, through which the wood for winter food is passed; the other, called the beaver entrance, is often winding in its course. Both these entrances open into a moat around the house, too deep to freeze easily, so that the beavers are not likely to be shut in. When the trees near the water are used up and the land is too uneven for rolling, log-slides or canals are cut in the bank to carry down the timbers. These may be hundreds of feet long and about a yard in width and depth.

So they may easily pass back and forth under the winter s ice, and that they may have room to store food, dams are built to increase the water about the lodges. They are often of great size—one is reported as being 1,530 feet long. The first step in dam-building is selection of a suitable site, a narrow place with firm bottom. Then work is begun on felling trees. They commence by gnawing deep parallel grooves about the trunk, in chips pull out the wood between the grooves; repeating this until nothing is left but a few last fibres, the trunk is ready to fall. Some say they always plan for the tree to fall toward the water, others declare they work haphazard. After the tree is down the beavers set to work lopping off branches and cutting it in lengths they can drag into the water. The short logs, dragged or floated to the desired spot, are sunk lengthwise across the current and kept down by means of stones, sod and mud loaded on by the beavers. To provide for winter needs, they collect a goodly supply of birch* willow and poplar.