BEAVERS!

architect of the world. We're going to discover that not only are they incredible animals just how they are constructed, but how they construct the world around them and shape the ecology and the environment, and they have had a surprisingly large impact on human history. Discover this more as we answer the age old question will God get mad at you for eating beaver tails? Joining me today is writer for American Dad and co host of Quick Question

with Thorn and Daniel Sore and Booie. Welcome, Hello, Hello, Katie. Thank you for having me. The way that you were describing this episode, it made me feel like I was walking down the street in nineties seventies New York and just all these smut stores around me that are just like beavers Part one. Beavers, Beavers everywhere, Beavers all the time. That must have been what it was seven all beavers, no questions, asked, Well, I'm talking about beavers because you

requested it. You asked for beavers. Yeah, I did. This is uh, this is like I got I don't know when it happened, but at some point my eyes were open to the beaver and I was like, this is the most important species in North America. I wouldn't and I wanted to talk about it, and I had no opportunity because no one wants to hear about beavers outside of like these very specific circumstances. So I jumped at the opportunity. When you gave me, you gave me an

animal to choose. Yes, this is the place for it. Yeah, beavers are surprisingly important, and I think that they're maybe like I don't know if goofy would be the right word for it, but they're just very affable looking. They don't look like, you know, it's not like a jaguire or a lion where you're like, oh, yeah, that's a

keystone species right there. But here they are sitting with their little paddle tails and buck teeth nibbling on some twigs, and you're like, you're just a beaver, what's the big deal? They wait, they walk is very funny. They kind of lumber around and they did their tails too heavy to even pick up. They got to drag it when they swim. They're kind of silly looking because they only swim with their back legs. They're real fun. There's nothing elegant about

a beaver. They're kind of scary. Have you ever seen one in person? No? I haven't. I've seen one. I used to work on golf courses when I was younger, and golf courses are like, well, beavers are the bane of a golf course because they can flood areas of it, and also they build a lot of the golf courses in like these low lands, these like the low flat areas at the beginning of the bottom of like glacier ruins.

But um, they they are huge, like they're much bigger than you expect, and they're terrifying looking because their teeth are like this bright bright orange. Yeah. Yeah, they are not the cartoon beaver with the chubby cheeks in the bright white teeth who looks small and cuddly. They're huge they are hefty, and they have bright orange, sharp chisel like teeth, which are as terrifying as they sound. To be frank, like, you were right to be afraid of

the beavers. Don't let anyone shame you for being afraid of a beaver. There's been at least one fatality from a beaver. A beaver, I believe, bit a man so deep it severed his femoral artery and he died. Oh my god, I think you're gonna tell me that a beaver laid some sort of McCaulay colkinto with a had a tree right right right, a sort of Rube Goldberg device of trees and twigs and a pine cone, and then just like a big boulder. Yeah. No, he just bait him real good and he died from being bit

so bad. Yeah. I don't don't remember home alone entirely, so to be fair, still could be that could have happened. I don't remember. I definitely don't mean to make light of anyone's death. Every death is a tragedy, but God, that must have been award you know. It's like it's not the most noble of death, like I was talking about earlier. You get eaten by a jaguar or a lion, and you're like, he was malled to death by a line. It's like, wow, okay, what a way to go out,

malled to death by a beaver. But you know, they are a keystone species, so maybe that's a consolation prize. Probably not. Probably not. Uh So, beavers are giant rodents. The are the second largest rodents in the world, beat out only by the cappy bara. So yeah, they are. Yeah, they they are rodents. They kind of maybe tricky a little bit with the flat tail instead of the long, thin tail, but they're absolutely rodents and gross when you

say rodents, I don't Yeah, I guess that's not. Like that's not my favorite aspect of the beaver, that they're part of that family. But I mean, I'm willing to live with it. But cappy barras are rodents and they're adorable and sweet. I don't know, I kind of get creeped out by cappy bars with it really strange to me. I do like that, like other animals seem so um disarmed by them that you always see like a bunch of other animals around them, just like, yeah, I love

this thing, big stuffed animal, but I don't know. They're all of them look like they like a Civil War general to me, Yeah, well, colonel, looks like I'm going to eat some alfalfa. Ah. That's what they would say all the time you were a kid. You're great. Improbably this watering hole is full of gatas doesn't bother me none. So uh. There are two species of living beavers, the North American beaver and the Eurasian beaver the North America.

The North American beaver lives in North America. The Eurasian beaver lives in Eurasia. So the North American beaver is longer with a wider tail, and the Eurasian beaver has a thinner tail and a longer snout. I can't really tell them apart, so they all look like beavers. I was pretty excited when I suggested this to think, Oh, I wonder if there's a bet as accounts from when

they first came to the United States. And I was assuming at this point that because I live in the United States, there are no beavers anywhere else in the world. And I was like, I wonder what it was like for them to first encounter beavers, And so I was like I'll look up Wiss and Clark and see like they're accounting of it. And then I was like, oh, no, they all knew what beavers were. Everybody knew what beavers

were for centuries because they're everywhere. But maybe, uh, something that you might like to hear is that, certainly monks that would be scribes they didn't know what beavers were, and their interpretation of the beavers were extremely funny. Uh, yes, I would like to hear. Yes, we we will talk about that later in the show. Um, but just a teaser. Monks didn't know how to draw beavers. They really, they gave it a they gave it the good old college, try,

the good old monastery tribe. But no, no, didn't know what a beaver was, didn't didn't really grasp sort of the critical aspects of the beaver and how you would represent what a beaver is. Um. So yeah, there were there are definitely accounts of people who didn't know what the beaver was and what to make of it. Just some quick fun beaver facts. Beavers in the wild lived to be about twelve years old, but they can live

to be almost twenty in captivity. Most adult beavers weigh around forty to seventy pounds, that's sevent they're they're they're big guys. You know, they're hefty. Uh. They can reach up to around four ft or one point two meters long. So yeah, it is correct to fear the beaver. They're big. They're really and like their their body is just like

a big mound too. So when you see them, obviously the tail gives them some extra length and that's a little unnerving to see a big leathery thing d behind them. But like, they they're pretty tall when they get old enough, like they're as tall as a little as like a moderate moderately sized dog. Yeah. Yeah, In fact, old fat beavers because they keep they can keep just growing almost until they die. They can weigh up to a hundred

pounds or so. Yeah, I'm just I don't know why, but I just because beavers actually formed these like cohesive family units where they're they're um um managma, what am I trying to say? Monogau Yeah, and they will have like these you know, sometimes live with their extended families. I'm just imagining this like old like beaver patriarch with like a stogie sitting on the front porch of the beaver lodge. Just this massive mound of beaver. It's like, lift up, pep PEPs. Tale left a log under there

to chew on and I can't reach it. That's a good little beaver, thank you. But speaking of large beavers, an extinct species of be he was the giant beaver, which was a bare sized beaver that lived in North America during the Oh Boy pleased a scene around three million years ago and went extinct around twelve thousand years ago. So we definitely coincided with a giant, bare sized beaver. Uh, which you know, you're it's fair to say you're maybe

a little bit cautious around normal sized beavers. Imagine a bare sized beaver with the teeth and the tail and just the beaver energy, but sized up, you know, to bear. I'm I'm looking at the skeleton of it and it's scary. This is great. I want these now, this thing is Oh, here's a woman posing next to a statue of one, so I can get some real context here there. Uh her their teeth are about this, like one of their

teeth is about the size of her face. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, have you ever seen like a beaver with just like a little twig that they sort of snap in half and easily chew through and get all the green, nice lipping tissue out of. Imagine that, but it's instead of a twig, it's you. You a person. Yeah, this thing could bite with through my legs one easy easy. It could like flosce its teeth with your entire body,

no problem. Weirdly enough, it turns out humans survived rather than the beaver, so when it was giant bare sized beaver versus humans, we came out on top, which seems improbable given that the the the bare sized beavers were around six ft long or almost two meters, and could weigh up to two pounds or so. They're also semi aquatic, just like their modern relatives. They could take a massive amount of oxygen and main underwater for extended periods of time.

So you could be an ancient human living in North America just bathing in a river and then just a massive bear beaver comes up out of the water and looks at you with its bright orange teeth and beady little roading eyes. I mean, given how family oriented beavers are and how like they need that sense of affection, you could steal one of those baby beavers. I guarantee at some point ancient man tried to domesticate and then ride one tried to mount the beaver. Yeah, that probably happened.

Surely they would. There's no other reason to domesticate it. I don't think other than maybe you could train, just train it. I am trying to think of like riding the beaver though it's like hi, ho beaver, and then it's just sort of wattles, you know. Yeah, I guess I don't know how fast these are not they probably can't cover much ground. Not too fast, no, um, but you know you could like put your that would be if you don't need to go too fast, you could ride the beaver and like set your kid up on

its tail. Whole family to sitting on the tail you're on the beaver. You know, it's about the experience. You don't get a beaver to go from a to beat. I mean, you get a you get a beaver because that's like your fun ride. That's when you take out for like a real spit right exactly exactly. And they don't have like the upkeep of like a giant sloth, So you know, it's it's a good option for for a small family. I think, um, can I get you in one of these bad boys today? Sore? And you

know what, I think? What do I have to do to get you onto one of these bad boys right now? Uh? So yeah, it's brain was smaller proportionally to its body compared to today's beaver, so it was a lot dumber. So maybe that's why it died out. Uh. Humans might have hunted it to extinction. I can't imagine, like wanting to face a beaver in combat, but it's possible. There's not really evidence of that. Uh, but somehow they were there, big and beavery and now they're gone. So who knows?

It is said the savor two tigers got him? I mean, but I don't think they could, because it's sure saber tooth tigers they got the big teeth, but beavers they got even bigger teeth and just like they do rattling their teeth together like sabers. That'd be fun to watch them. Fascinating thing. So we go to the Libra tarpits is here in l A and I go there frequently with my child, and uh, I learned a fascinating detail about

sabre tooth tigers. That is obviously tangential to this, but I think could help inform how the sabre tooth tiger might have killed the beaver, which was they didn't grab their prayer around the neck because like wily mamison stuff, had so much fur and everything around their necks that they weren't choking out there the same way like a tiger or lion. Now, just like the easiest way to kill something is just cut off in socks, so like

they just bite hard enough to do that. But thet same to tire couldn't do that because everything in the ice age was so furry, like thick with with fat. So they would just jump on its back whatever it was, it's ground sloth or whatever, and they would dig their teeth in as far as they could and then just follow the animal as it bled out. So it's like like a capri son, you just punch, punch a little hole in it, suck out the juice, that's right, and

you just wait. Yeah, well, maybe maybe a saber tooth tiger could just kind of do a capri son on a giant beaver. I don't know. I wasn't there speaking speaking of giant teeth though, beavers have some of the most interesting impressive teeth in the natural world, and I'm talking about present day beavers. Beaver teeth constantly grow because they do, indeed eat trees. This is one of those things that like as a kid, I was like, they eat trees, And then when I was like a young adult,

I was like, there's no way beavers eat trees. That's got to be a myth. And then now it's like, yeah, they eat trees, you know. Uh, So like they do tree bark um. They are herbivores. They eat a bunch of different types of plants, like aquatic plants, lily pads, cattails, rushes, They'll eat roots, leaves, ferns, human legs. Uh. They eat tree bark and camby um, which is a fleshy layer

just under the bark. It's full of sugars um. They use trees not just in their diet but in their construction project, which we're gonna talk a little more after the break that's coming up. But um, before we talk about that, the teeth, the teeth that allows them to cut through all this wood. They are amazing. Their teeth are constantly growing because of all the heavy duty chewing they have to do. If they your teeth didn't constantly grow, they'd wear their teeth down to useless nubs in like

a month. I feel very um connected to beavers because I actually clench and grind my teeth. It's like I have bruxi is um So I'm just like constantly clenching, and every time I go to the dentist, they're like, you're just gonna have like nubs for teeth if we don't do something about this soon. Yeah, I guess I'm a little jealous of all the I think like rats

are the same way, where their teeth just keep growing. Uh, And that sounds great, I mean, because I'm constantly having terrifying dreams about shattering my teeth or my teeth falling out more and more tooth. Behind all of that, I feel so much better. I mean, just the prospect of chipping a tooth now it seems like your screw you

won't survive, you can't eat anymore. Yeah. No, I mean that it is a problem for a lot of animals if there's a problem with your teeth as a carnivore or a nerb of I mean basically anything that needs to use their teeth to eat, which is most animals, if your teeth go wrong, then you just you die

because you don't have any method of eating. So with beavers, actually, if they are unable to wear their teeth down, they can also die because if their teeth are misaligned and they don't get that constant where their teeth still grow. And so what happens is their teeth just grow and grow and grow. And you know, have you ever seen pictures of like gross, really long nails, and how like when nails get long enough they start to curl. It's

the same thing that happens with their teeth. It just they grow until they start to curl and they can actually grow up from their mouth and curl around and like puncture their own skull, which is horrible awesome. And so I I so I gave you a picture of it. Okay, let's oh god, oh he's not long for this world. That will just go right into his brain, right, I mean, it depends where it hits him in his skull, but

probably yeah. I mean this one that kind of looks like it's getting him, getting him in the eye a little bit, which is not great. Uh, there's no it's also like, once that's happened, it's not very easy to eat or probably think with tooth in your skull. So if tooth in the school doesn't get him, probably the inability to eat well. So not not a great uh, not a good thing. This happens to uh any beaver that has a condition known as malclusions. So yeah, beaver

retainers would potentially save beaver lives. But for a healthy beaver, their teeth will be worn down into a perfect tree cutting chisel shape because, like you mentioned earlier, sore and their teeth are bright orange, and that is because they are so rich in iron that they have this discoloration. So their enamel on the front of their tooth is packed with iron, and on the other side of the

tooth it's softer, just made of dentine. So as they chew, it causes uneven wearing because the front wears slower than the back, and that causes an angle to form, and then that way, their teeth are actually shaped like chisels, and that chisel shape is much better at getting into wood and cutting into it like an axe. That's really cool. So it's they're just basically you're creating a sharp edge every single time, they's they self sharpened, they self sharpened.

They're constantly growing and self sharpening. It's I mean, I wish I had kitchen knives, but it was just beaver. I guess that would be really good because then you wouldn't need to sharpen them. You just uh, you know, I wouldn't need to get a new new beaver when it wears down. I guess you would need to get a new beaver like in twenty years when it dies. But no, that'd be great. Could you imagine how fast a beaver could like Julian a carrot perfect? Oh man,

it would be so quick. Yeah. I So there's a documentary I think it's on PBS. It's on Nature where they that's the one where that maybe fall in love with beavers, And in it they're talking about how, uh, every single night, like a beaver can chop down tons of trees. And I thought I thought it took a beaver very very long time to chop down a single tree, like you think about the diameter of like a a birch or something that's maybe a foot or twelve inches, And it turns out that they could do that in

like four hours. Yeah. Yeah, nothing to them. Yeah, if it's a small enough tree, they can sometimes fell like a more slender tree and just like fifty minutes. It's crazy. Uh yeah, and they they will. The fact that each individual beaver can bring down a tree so quickly means that they will have huge, huge impacts in their environment. You know, you imagine just one beaver being able to take out multiple trees in a day, and then you

increase that number two millions of beavers. They have just a massive, massive impact on the local ecosystem in what I considered to be a positive way. Maybe golf courses don't consider it to be a thing, but yeah, we will talk about the way that beavers are one of the world's most impressive environmental engineers. Right after, so excited, so excited. I so we we got a cat recently, a little kitten, and uh I for the first time. Put I haven't had a cat since I was a child.

And I had to put fleet stuff on. Yeah yeah, that's like just these little drops. So I like push as she's eating and very calm, I pushed this the fur up. I put squirre it on and they're like, be careful not to get this in your cat's eyes. Dude, it's very bad if you get this in your cat's eyes. So I squired it on there and I'm like, good done, and I put pull my hands away and she feels something wet on her neck, so she immediately shakes and it goes right in my eye. And I was like,

oh God. So I run to the to the sink and I'm just splashing water in there, trying to get as much as I can in there. And then I read the instructions again. It was like, if you get this in your eyes, hold the eye open and wash it for fifteen to twenty minutes. And I was like, oh, the eyes gone. Then there's no way I could do

this for fifteen or twenty minutes. And it stung and it didn't feel great the rest of the night, and then I went to sleep and I woke up in the morning and my eye was crusted shut, like to the point where I like pull out of my eyelashes and finally got it open and it was finding. But I was like, there was a perilous moment where I thought, that's it. That's it from my eye. At least you don't at least you don't have to worry about getting fleas in your eye though. That's that's a really nice

silver lining, Kati, Yes, so so. And you know how Elon Musk is always talking about how he's going to terraform this, and he's going to terraform that. You know, No, but that seems like something he would say. It's like, well, just terraform Mars. We're gonna terraform, you know, I'm gonna do some light terraform and over here, Uh, screw Alon Musk.

The real terraform ers of the world are beavers. Uh. They have a complex social system and build structures that not only help them survive but shape the world around them. So as we all know, I think I think I can comfortably say, as everyone knows, beavers build dams the kind of they're defining characteristic um other than the weird tails in the big teeth. And they also build lodges, which are where the beavers live. The beavers don't really live in the dams. The dams are just to make

their area of the water more comfortable for them. So uh, usually they will build in a freshwater area. Rivers, streams, ponds, and lakes are all candidates for beaver construction projects. Beavers will create a wooden fortress right in the body of the water. And this fortress where they sleep and they you know, raise their young and uh stay warm in the winter, is called a lodge. So the dam is basically just they don't like flowing water. One could say

they hate flowing water. They hate the sound of it. The sound of it drives them to start building a dam. Uh. And the dam will slow the flow of water such that they have a nice serene, uh bucolic uh pond for them to build their residence. We talked a lot about their incredible memorial artery chomping teeth, and they can use these to carefully cut trees at a forty five degree angle so that they will fall down efficiently and

in a predictable fashion. And they use a bunch of rocks as the base of their dam, and then they use those rocks to way down the logs that they stack up, and uh they use muddy grass to patch up the whole. So some real complex construction going on. And while it doesn't completely stop the flow of water, it slows it down enough that building a lodge is possible. So beaver lodges are where they sleep where they seek shelter.

Some of them can be fancier as a beaver ages and gets more experienced, like more construction experience, their lodges and damn building will get better and they might add in like a dining room, maybe a foyer. Uh you know, maybe an alcove. Uh it's ah uh. So inside the lodge there's a raised floor above water levels, so they actually stay nice and dry even though there's no entry

point outside of the water. So under the lodge you'll have usually a couple of entrances, if not more, but you have to dive under the water and swim up through a tunnel to get into the lodge. And inside it's raised up so they're dry. But nobody like unless you're aquatic and willing to swim under this construction, you cannot get inside at the lodge, so that keeps them safe from most predators. And they also will create a raft, which is a huge underwater mound of edible sticks and logs.

It goes so deep underwater most herbivorous animals can't get to it. So during the winter, when a lot of animals are suffering from malnutrition or lack of resources, beavers are all set up. They have this great food supply that they can just kind of quickly exit their little lodge, grab, go back in, warm up, have a little cute little beaver time where they snack on all the logs that they've stored up. Uh. And so the only exception is like a novice beaver may build a pretty pathetic lodge

and damn on their first attempts. It's definitely learning process. Usually young beavers will learn from the older generations, but it is sometimes a little bit pitiful, Like they'll put some sticks together and it immediately gets washed away, which well, they don't have to they don't always have to start from scratch. I mean, they're like they'll find there are

a lot of like um, abandoned beaver lodges. But then a young beaver can come along and be like, oh, this looks like a nice fixer upper, and they can. And that's one of the reasons I like to beaver so much that I think that home renovation and monogamy are cool and that goes against the grid, and I think that if we can start telling everybody, hey, listen, these are actually cool aspects. These are character traits that are really cool, then maybe everyone would think a little

bit more highly of the beaver. Who are you, Tim Allen in the popular nineties sitcom Boam Improvement. Does that answer your question? Um? Yeah, like they I guess they's some of the um abandoned ones that they've torn apart, the lodges. They found wood in there. That's like a thousand years like that. They just keep using these places because, like he, the beavers leave it when they run out

of food in a particular area. But then the benefit of having this huge these like deep canals dug everywhere and like these swampy areas is that as soon as a beaver leaves, that place just reflourishes with all kinds of plants and stuff, and the next beaver can set us, set up shop and eat all over again. You're absolutely right. In fact, communal beaver dams and constructions can last for

many decades. In fact, in Canada's Wood Buffalo National Park, beavers have constructed a damn about a half mile long, so that's just about under a kilometer and it's so large it can be seen from space, which I just love that. We're like, oh man, the Great Wall can be seen from space. Human constructions is just like beavers are over here going like, hey, us to look at what would made this out? Would check this out? Humans?

Forget about the beavers. Don't forget about us. You're trying to forget about the beavers again, didn't you trying to escape on your little spaceships? Not this time. You're not helping me make the beaver cool? Just a cool voice. Sure I've been doing it all wrong. So yeah, they have been working on this construction since the nineteen seventies. So this giant damn in would Buffalo National Park, it

is uh from the nineteen seventies, if not older. And given that beavers only live an average of twelve years in the wild, this is the work of about four generations of beavers. So yeah, just they are absolutely capable of these massive, massive construction projects. Sometimes it's multigenerational, probably

passed on from one family to the younger generation. Not only only can they make huge dams that will cause flooding and slow the movement of water, they can also create canals to other ponds, rivers, and bodies of water like you mentioned earlier. And they do this mostly out of laziness because they don't as much as we think it's cute to see them waddling on land, they don't like to do that. So they will build a canal from their pond to another body of water so they

can easily just like zoom right to another source of food. Uh, just like a like a like a beaver hyperloop. Uh, you know, suck on it. Elon the beavers. I just love that beavers are such a bane to rich people. They're flooding their golf courses, They're ruining their walmarts. They're constant reminder walmarts. Well they own the walmarts, right, we

go to the walmarts, they on the walmarts. But yeah, like I love that they humiliate Elon Musk because they've done everything Elon Musk says he's gonna do, but can't do. What are they So they they're just not great walkers, right, Like, they just don't walk well on land. So is it that they're underwater they're just safer? Is that? Yeah, they're faster,

they're safer. Uh, it's easier, takes less you know, effort. So, like to pull wood and vegetation from another place, pulling it on land is a lot harder course, So that makes perfect sense. Yeah, it's way easier to carry a whole tree underwater. Yeah, to try drag it across the land. Yeah, it's like a beaver interstate or I guess like inter

inter pond, interpool, yeah, interpola. So all these beaver constructions have a massive effect on the ecosystem, which makes them a keystone species, which means a species of animal that has a disproportion effect on their ecosystem. So they are the biggest architects of the environment other than humans, which you know, we have a disproportional effect on our environment.

But unlike the beaver's, uh, we're not maybe taking into consideration biodiversity when we're doing it, not that the beaver's really like sat down and thought about it, like we're going to be environmentally friendly, Like we we want to build a dam, and we want to build a big pile sticks in the middle of the pond, but we're going to do it in a way that's like helpful.

I do like that. That's it's almost not even fair, Like we are basically this not to get too philosophical, but but that we are basically this parasite that we treat the earth kind of like a host where we just sort of like take, take, take, and and the beaver, like the beaver is relentless, like it's just it's cutting down trees all night. Face value of beaver does the sound great. It's damming up water so it keep water can't get to certain areas. It's cutting it on a

bunch of trees at night. It sounds like, oh, yeah, okay, I can relate to that. That's what people do too. But no, like what they're actually doing is with these damns, they're creating these floodplains, and they're creating these areas that now allow tons of other life to sustain. Like all these other species now are can come to this one area because now it's much more lush and green than it ordinarily would have been. Just a straight channel river

or stream was like flowing through it. And they're so good for the environment. Then they don't even eat the other animals either. They're just sitting there eating their sticks and they're content and in their big lodges in the middle of winter, they're like, oh, muskrats, would you like to come join us in our lodge? And the muskrats like, yeah, don't mind if I do well, family of rats, would

you like to live in here too? And like these other they just these they build these boarding houses essentially for other animals. I'm just so mad, so mad that well, if it makes you feel any better. From the trees perspective, the beaver is the world greatest villain. That's true. That's true. Yeah, beavers and lumberjacks. So yeah, you're you're absolutely right. They create these huge wetlands single handedly, or like single potted

lee single yeah, single tailedly. It's hard to decide that job. All terrible puns here, folks. But yeah, So they raise the water table, so that means that there's more access to fresh water above ground. In addition, their dams also filter out pollutants and helps slow the loss of soil through erosion, and this can change the environment chemically, like raising the levels of nitrogen in the soil, which makes it more fertile and increases the bio diversity of plant life.

So beavers moving change up the water system and suddenly you just have all these new speech use of plants that are able to live there because the soil is much more nutritious, there's more access to water above the ground, accessible to plants and it's amazing. They just like make

it verdant and full of plant life. Um. This also increases the number of aquatic life in the area, uh that thrives in the calmer waters that beavers constructs, so things like snails and earthworms, dragonflies, frogs, even muscles, um. And then once you get all of these little critters into the pond, then that has a cascading effect of

inviting bigger animals in. So uh it increases like fish populations like salmon and trout, lots of birds, especially aquatic birds who love to come in and feast upon this like little biosphere that these beavers have created. Ah. And uh it can even have like these really unexpected effects, like increasing bat populations because bats like to often feed around water, especially where you're gonna have a lot of insect activity, and so you'll you'll have this increase in

bat populations. And it's just it's like kind of a jump to get from like beaver cuts down tree, puts the tree in water, and now you have more bats. Uh yeah, what's the problem. How is that hard to understand? The beavers make bats beavers? Yeah, yeah, I mean, like that's that's the thing right, So like bats like Batman is really cool, but really Beaverman would be uh, would be able to defeat Batman right by the laws of nature,

young Beaman. Yeah, I guess like beaver probably, I guess in this analogy, I guess, um, you know what's his name? I was gonna say Jeeves, but I know that's not right. Batman's but alert Uh Alfred, yeah, Alfred right, yeah, Alfred, he would be Bieverman, right, because Alfred is the one who fostered uh Batman. Yes, so Batman, Bruce Wade wouldn't be here without without without biman ak Alfred, sorry, Bieverman. Beverman can't believe I keep calling, keep blowing his cover.

It would be really funny to have Batman like putting on his mask Era and like putting on his coal and being like, I'm going to get in the car, and Alfred's like, oh true, forgeting something, Master Bruce, and he's just dressed as a bes like, I don't, I

don't know. I think maybe not tonight. Could you could you at least lose the teeth no muster booth that is an integral part of my costume, and Batman just doesn't want to go out with takes him out a couple of times just to be like, well, it's like doing your ride along with a cop. Like he's going to take him out just to let him see the sights and let him feel like he's being but like, really, Beaverman just kind of gets in the way. I'm the

terror who slaps in the night. Do you have a warn for this, Master Ruse, I told you not to use my name most Bruce Batman Batman Master Bruce, I am so sorry, but yeah, Beaverman much cooler than Batman. Um. They have just an enormous impact on the ecosystem. Uh yeah, I mean, like anything that has an impact on the ecosystem.

They can have a negative impact on some species, so uh, animals that would prefer a fast moving river to a pond, some migratory species of birds that want dense forests rather than wetlands. They'll have a negative impact on their populations. But in the balance, Beaver's increased biodiversity. So for every like species that is not pleased with what they've done with the place, there's like five others who are like, yeah, this is great, we love everything. Just being a big

old swamp. There's like when they want to reintroduce wolves to an area in the United States, they're like, well, are their beavers there? It's like they need beavers there first before like wolves can be reintroduced. It's it's like they're connected to every other species and it's like it's like a big game of um seven six degrees of Kevin Bacon where they all lead back to the beaver, but it just takes a little while to figure out how to get there. How many degrees do you think

Kevin Bacon is from a beaver? I could figure it out just one, right, It's just Bacon to beaver directly, there's no middleman. Yeah, I think it's probably true. Beavers have a direct line to Kevin Bacon and him right now. Yeah, yeah, they've got He was like, you are you do you like Kevin Bacon? You'll like, I can get you right and riding with Kevin Bacon. I could fite him over. We could be here by two o'clock. He loves swimming. I'll just put some put some logs on stoven. He'll

come right over. Yeah. So yeah, it's there an amazing example of how it is definitely possible to drastically alter the environment without causing a total collapse of the ecosystem, which is something beavers have done. But humans, you know, m you know, we we got we got a few light issues with our like punching a hole in the ozone and papers are like, oh, you don't want to do that. Actually you don't know that beaver. Maybe some more species will really like this. No, that's not I'm

pretty sure. No. Have you thought about maybe just putting some sticks in the water. That's pretty nice. We tried and it was bull beaver. Well, when we get back right after the break, we're going to talk more about the relationship between beavers and people, and stay tunned until the end of the episode because we will be revealing the answer to last week's Mystery animal sound contest and giving you a whole new mystery sound to ponder over beavers, beavers,

and some people. Yeah, so, beavers have had a very complex relationship with humans, going back to ancient times. We have often used beavers towards our own twisted ends, or thought of them as pests due to the flooding that they can cause, which I think it's sad. I like beavers, we hunted almost extinction. Yeah, I think that's I know

it is sad, right, it's pretty sad. Uh. If you have listened to some of the older episodes of this show, or if you've send to Alex Schmidt's great podcast, secretly incredibly fascinating the episode on vanilla, which I'm biased towards because I was actually the gift on that one because he knew how much I wanted to talk about beaver butts. You may note that beaver anal glands secrete a musk that can be used as artificial vanilla flavoring. Yum, yum, yum.

Give me some of that. But just imagining a farmer waking up in the morning, you know, the sun's rising. He goes out to the barn. It's filled with beavers. He gets out a little tiny pale. It's like, all right, chompers, it's your turn just expressing those glands. All right, let

me just get right in here, choppers. I know, I know it's uh, and they makes such fundtle noises to beavers do kind of like a Yeah, in medieval times people mistook the beaver's anal glands for their testicles, and because in medieval times, actually people did want to use that anal secretion called castoreum for a variety of things, uh, perfumes, vanilla flavoring, probably an aphrodisiac. I actually don't know that. It's just most animal parts, most like weird animal parts

where we're like, let's eat this. It's usually something like oh yeah, this, this will set them move some beaver anal gland juice. Uh is that what castor oil is? Then? No, castor oil is from castor seed, I believe, whereas castoreum is the beaver butt juice. So but yeah, in medieval times they thought castoreum came from beaver testicles, and so there was a myth about beavers chewing off their own testicles so they wouldn't be hunted. And gosh, many monks

sure tried hard to draw this happening. They really did try. Uh. One guy said it like good enough for us put in the books. Yeah, I draw it. Yeah, I mean so I shared this with you. Sort of course it will be in the show notes. But it is a picture of a hunter on a horse, you know, majestic, beautiful stallion, and then a beaver. Uh it looks I don't know, kind of like a dog. Yeah, And it is chewing its own testicles off. That's the important part.

Its tail isn't quite what one would consider a beaver tail to be. These kind of long, elegant lap back legs, some kind of like sharp ears and yeah, then like a little kind of like a whiff a whiff of a tail. Yeah, I guess they're trying to show that it's flat. It's not. There's there's not a lot of beaver connection I'm seeing to this. And this is a

theme if you just google like medieval beaver drawing. Uh not many people past the test of you know, is this a beaver to the to the credit of the monks, I don't think they understand genitals generally, because there's something strange going on with the horse as well. And not that I'm like that's the first thing, right, kind of sounds like it, but you know, go on the horses. The horses genitals in this picture are also very confusing.

There's a lot of like curls. It's a little bit of a sort of looks more like a note signature or something on a piece of music. It's not really uh, you know, and not I'm not you know, not to say like I would have preferred them to have lovingly

crafted a very realistic horse apparatus. But you know, yeah, and they do have an interesting idea for because like the beaver is chewing off its own testicles, but the position of it is like not quite physically speaking, since making a testicles stone look qui, they look more like laby a major Yeah. It actually you know what, if you didn't know they were testicles, it kind of looks like an attempt to draw the big beaver teeth. Yeah, Oh,

that's the most beaver aspect. You're absolutely right, that's the most beaver aspect of this entire picture. Right, But those are in fact actually testicles. Maybe that's why maybe they thought their teeth were testicles. Man, med medieval guys must have been really sick with something, so like it's like, yeah, that's what that's what they're looking down. Yeah, that's what a normal testicle looks like. That's what how they became monks. They realized early on, this can't be right, this can't

be right. I'm just gonna go to a monastery. I don't think this is right. I'm not gonna put any more thought into it. This is just can't be it. Yeah, well, in fact, you know, the not only do beavers not chew off their own testicles. Testicles have nothing to do with castrium. It is just the anal glands, the musk

that they use for territorial marking. Nevertheless, people throughout history have tried castoreum for a number of uses for the treatment of ailments such as vertigo, flatulence, epilepsy, sciatica, hiccups, and toothaches. Uh. None of these I believe have ever been like backed up by any data that it works.

It was also thought to be useful to treat toxic womb syndrome uh and hysteria in women, which were very very real diseases and not things doctors just made up to explain when like your wife didn't want to cook dinner for you every night. Uh. I just love I don't know, I love all the weird names we gave to like women just generally not being super happy with like, you know, just women star like, Yeah, get the general

displeasure of the system that was built for them. I'm saying, Oh, I do think I might like the right to vote. Sounds like you've got a case of womb with legs. The case of the flying womb. Yeah, because wandering wounds syndrome was another one which I don't I guess they thought the womb went somewhere where it's not supposed to. But yeah, so apparently, uh, beaver anal beaver anal glands good for um, the disease that women would get when

they were less than happy with medieval life. Um. So probably the beaver butt juice doesn't help with most of these ailments. But it does have a chemical composition that includes solicilic acid, which is from their tree bark heavy diet, which does make it somewhat chemically similar to aspirin. So maybe there were some legit uses for it. But disclaimer, like I wouldn't go around huffing beaver butt instead of

just going to the pharmacy and getting an aspirin. Although the way things are going now, I just feel like that's going to be the next thing. Right. It's like, first horse butt medicine, now beaver butt medicine for like, you know, for just anything, any weird thing we can try to put in our bodies. Uh, as long as it doesn't come in like, you know, a pharmaceutical bottle. Yeah, as long as the Western medicine didn't create it. I think that this is a good good thing to put

away in your brain if you're ever in a hatchet situation. Yeah. Yeah, so you're out there in the world and you got a headache by the beaver, give it a shot. When you survived the ordeal, come back and tell us. If a beaver choose off your legs and it really hurts, grab that beaver and rubb its butt against your face. You know, it's only fair beaver causes the problem. Yeah, just like, look, you took my legs, now I'm taking your butt. Glance. Um. This is just kind of a

fun little thing. In medieval Europe, beavers were not even really considered mammals given their aquatic nature, so their leathery, scaly, fish like tails were not considered to be red meat. They thought this is probably more like fish. So the Catholic Church allowed people to eat beaver tails during Lent. What a weird detail that they allowed to stay through history. Someone thought to write that down at some point. Yeah, it's like, yeah, we can eat beaver tails those that's

pretty cool. I just love that. The Catholic Church just like all these parishioners going like, well, what about beaver tails. What do you mean what about beaver tails? Well, they're not really red meat right there, kind of fish. Yeah, I guess, so you can eat beaver tails. What about the fish part of the beaver. Yeah, the fish part of the beaver is fine. Eat that. What about its head? No, no, just the tail, that's the mammal part. What about its balls, Yes, okay,

you can do that. Obviously it's balls. I'm so sick of answering these questions. Uh so. Yeah. Beavers were a major force in the history of North America, both before and after European colonization. Obviously, aside from the fact that they created these verdant oasis is of biodiversity that was very good for humans to be able to go and

fish and live off the land. Uh. Beaver meat was very popular among many American Indian tribes and nations due to the fact that they remain well fed even in winter. So uh, you know, they have that larder of logs under the water that they have access throughout the wind throughout the winter, so they stay nice and fatty, whereas other animals might struggle more during the winter. So for a hungry human, finding a beaver a nice plump beaver

during the winter would be a real real windfall. Now, after European colonization, the fur trade was a major driver of colonization and expansion. In fact, it was so profitable and so popular that it was the cause of the Beaver Wars also known as the French and Iroquois Wars from around sixteen hundred to seventeen hundred. If you're wondering, like, well, why were beaver pelts so popular? Were people just going around with like furry hats all the time? Uh, you

could do a lot of modifications to beaver pelts. So they would actually make top hats out of beaver pelts by removing the guard hairs so it didn't look like a fluffy beaver coat. They would, you know, remove all the guard hairs and so you'd have this like tough but very shiny like material that they could make a fancy top hat. And so that's totally worth nearly driving a species to extinction and taking over the land of people who already lived here. Ah, Yeah, to get your

shiny hats. Kind of what it boiled down to the beaver pelt was there are a bunch of different hats you can make like, um, the remember the Napoleon's type of hat, like that kind of hat like there they structurally held up very well, like they'd stick stick up off the top of the head very well. And it's just kind of like this nice felty material and hats were I guess really important. Yeah, it was like we're like,

we went to war for hats. It's weird. We like, you know, maybe this is oversimplifying it, but we drove the Native American people from their homes partially because it's like, we can make a lot of money out of hats. So yeah, I saw it. When I did look up lou Sin Clark, I was amazed to see how much there was, how much they had written about the beaver, and it turned out that, like Jefferson, there's just tons of it. First of all, they did eat it a lot.

The it was like their favorite thing to eat along the way. And then they also, uh, they talked about it a lot because I because I guess jeff Jefferson was really interested in the fur trade, and like that was part of the reason that you sent them out there through this huge exploration, not only to see how far the rivers go, to see how much land they had a mass but they were like, no, we need to set up our own fur trade, and so we

need to find out how many beaver we have. Yeah, this is this is like one of the things that is frustrating to me about how like American history is taught in schools, because like I think, now it's not being whitewashed as much, but it's like, you know, when I was a kid, it was like, yeah, we we needed to find a place to escape religious persecution, and then so that's why we all we have America now.

And then as you learn more about it, it's like we really wanted to kill a bunch of beavers and turn them into ass and and so we like so we like drove them nearly to extinction, like did a genocide just so we could have our cool hats. All right, yeah, they're like, we want to kill all these beavers, but there's all these people in the way. Just move them or kill them, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh yeah, cool, cool,

cool history. Love. It really really fun than when you're in elementary school and you're like, all right, now you're the pilgrims, right, fun now fun? Yeah. So yeah, due to the fur trade, beavers faced near extinction. In the eighteen hundreds, beavers were nearing extinction in North America and in Europe. The Eurasian beaver population at one point dwindled to only about one thousand individuals, So we were very close to losing the best the mole in the world.

And I'm not even being sarcastic, like without beavers there would be a lot less biodiversity, a lot of ecosystems collapsing. So after the fur trade became less popular in the nineteen hundreds, beaver populations recovered. So now there are over one million beavers in Europe, so not they didn't recover completely, but they did improve greatly. And in North America there are over fifteen million beavers, so that is quite an

impressive recovery. Uh. Yeah, ecologists know the importance of beavers as architects of biodiverse, fertile areas. In uh A Kadian National Park in the US, in Maine, the reintroduction of beavers to the area doubled the amount of wetlands in only fifty years. So they're just incredible. Like when we talk about like, oh, we want to tear a form mars, like Okay, put a bunch of beavers on Mars. Then it always rubs me the wrong way when it's like, yeah,

we gotta go colonize Mars. It's like, could we just like focus on one plan at a time, you know, I'm amazed that they also areas where they have a lot of drought. Like a way that you fix that is you just send beavers. Yeah, like they can fix it. Then they solve the problem of drought, which is crazy because you know, you're not getting any more rainfall or anything, but because they dig such deep canals and the and

when they raise the water table that also helps. It helps. Yeah, so like the water sticks around a lot more and it's just love. I did too. Beavers are They're pretty cool.

I feel like we talk a lot about like, oh, we could bring back the mammoth or like maybe more reasonably, like we could bring back the passenger pigeon, which is not as crazy an idea, but it's like maybe we should just slow down and start putting beavers in more places, you know, like just calm down a little bit, start on beavers, like before you know, we go to the mammoth or the passenger pigeon, because One of the problems with de extinction is that we got rid of the

eco system that originally supported passenger pigeons, let alone of mammoth Like, we do not have the same territory for mammoths to be able to thrive. I don't know if you've seen North America recently, but it's not exactly a mammoth haven. Uh So, like we always like these like cool ideas, and then if you're like, could we just put more beavers everywhere, you're like a boon nerd, you know,

but no, seriously, we should be putting beavers everywhere. We are still we are sort of yeah, we're I mean they're doing some of that, that's which is great. Yeah, just the humble beaver. It's like, you know, Canada doesn't seem as dorky now, does it with all their beaver emblems. They really do. Yeah, they're they're embracing of weird animals like the loon and the beaver. Is really inspiring to me, Yeah, because like they're willing to look past the silliness of

the animal be like, look, this animal is important. Can we all just be adults about this? Yeah? I wish you know, because like in the us for like, oh, Paul Eagle, that's so metal, and it's like, yeah, no, I mean bald eagles are really cool. I love bald eagles. But yeah, probably we should have gone with a beaver, honestly. Uh. And there's I don't I don't know if you are you are you planning to talk about the like areas that are now flooding and everything because of beavers, like

residential areas that are flooding. No talk about it. Oh, so this is very exciting that beavers are You're excited for people being flood into beavers. Yeah, well, because you know when we hunted the beaver to almost death, that all of a sudden there are all these new like the place where beavers I'll live the most. If you can picture like a glacial region where a glacier went through an area, there's mountains on both sides and then there's a huge like horseshoe valley in the bottom of it,

and that's like where beavers thrived. And when we killed off all the beavers, that just became grasslands, like dried out grasslands, and everyone was like, oh, this is the perfect place to build a city. This is the perfect place to build a town, and and that's where like golf courses go, that's where ranches go, because there's so much fertile and it's all fertile because beavers made it fertile.

And so then when beavers are reintroduced or beaver numbers start coming back, they're building damns and anywhere that they hear water. And so when they're doing that, all those areas are flooding again. Everyone's like what takes the beavers? And the beavers will do it in a night to like people will go out there. They're like, culverts are a big problem underneath roads where beavers hear the water in the culvert, they damn up the culvert and it

just floods the road. And so the next day people will come and like remove all the dam and overnight the beavers will just build it again. Such hard work. I love this. I mean, like I feel a little sympathy for just like regular people living there. But on the other hand, this is rad It's the radical change that like we need in politics. Uh. I feel like, you know, there's a lot of arguments of like how

how do you actually protest capitalism? I think just being a beaver, you know, there's a there's a guy in Ontario. I think he's on Ontario. He's just this French Canadian guy who his for a long time. His job was basically like, you gotta get the beavers out of this one particular town or this area. And he was him hunting and killing beavers for a while and trapping them, but he's trapping other things because it's really hard to trap a beaver. We end up catching like different herons

and things like that. And he was getting really depressed by it. And then he was like, there's gotta be a way to work with the beaver. And he figured out that if he any area that was like a potentially could become this wetland area and they would end up flooding houses and things, he would put in the darts of what could be a great beaver dam, but with pipes at the bottom of it so that and then he would put um noise. He put it anywhere that he wanted the dever the beaver to build a damn.

He just put a CD player that it was playing the sound of water, yeah, because they're they're actually triggered by the sound of flowing water. To start construction of the dam and then they're triggered. But the sound of leaks, so like if the dam is leaking, they'll go in and locate where the sound is coming from. It's like I hear the sound. I hear the sound. I need to pack more sticks where the sound is. It's a quote of living in a house with like a leaky faucet,

where it's like I can't stand it. I won't, I won't live here having a beaver in the house and just just like a leaky faucet and you wake up and there's just a bunch of sticks in there. But by putting the pipes at the bottom of it, what he can do then is that once they build the dam in that area, if the water table ever gets too high, he just basically opens up the bottom one of these pipes and like lets out a bunch of

the water and they can close it right back. That's perfect bottle and sell that nice good beaver water, beaver purified water. Just the tiniest bit of beaver piss. Yeah, just the little just a little chef's kiss of beaver piss. But I love that he's like figured out how to how to work with them. No, it's we have to. We we got to learn to live with the beaver.

That's like, it's it's so important to recognize the importance of beavers because you know, we we talked about like, oh, it increases bio diversity and this is good for the environment. I think sometimes people get this perception that we're not really part of the environment, so we don't have to you know, it's like, oh, it's nice in theory to care about it, but you know, we're not. You know, when we're talking about biodiversity that doesn't really impact humans,

but it does. Oh it kind of kids. Yeah, oops, we're kind of you know, we're all we're in it.

We're in the environment. Uh. Also, yeah, now that it has actual like monetary um consequences, people are like, oh, maybe beavers aren't so bad that they're like these ranches where there are droughts and then they're looking for anywhere to put their cattle that actually has water, and so like they'll find other ranches where they know that beavers have like a presence there, and they're like, Okay, can we send our cows to here ranch for a while

to go graze and eat and everything, because they're like they're saving these ranches, there by creating water tables that are a little bit higher, and again fighting against drought. It is kind of sad though, that it comes down to, like we have all these droughts and like the sky is orange and we're like, maybe we made a mistake trying to kill off the beavers. I'm not trying to turn the beavers into half. It was fun, I'll admit that,

though they were so shiny. Well before we go, UM, I do need to reveal the mystery animal sound from

last week. So every week for this new season, I've been playing a little game with you the listener and you the guest, where I play an animal sound and you've got to guess who's talking, and if you answer correctly, and you write to me at Creature Feature Pod at gmail dot com, Creature feature pot on Instagram, or Creature feet Pod, that's eight that's something very different on Twitter, I will read aloud the names of the first three

people to guess the sound correctly. So, uh, as of recording this podcast, actually nobody has guessed the right answer to last week's mystery animal sound, which is a first. Uh, everyone's been pretty good at guessing things. So I raised the difficulty level a little bit and um, maybe raised a little too high because a tricky one. This is a tricky one. Um, I will just before releasing this all oh, keep checking so if somebody giveses it right,

I will answert it. Here. Hello, it's Katie. I'm speaking through a robot since I had to add this in last minute. Bee boo boop. Nobody guess the right animal, but good hustle everyone, bee beep, death to humans. Just kidding. So just to remind you and for you to listen to sore in, here is the sound from last week, and the hint was you do not want to get in a knife fight with this guy's yeah, oh yeah, yeah, all right, so that was the sound. So do you

have any guesses? Yes, it's the frog that can uh can send its own bones through its skin. That is so interesting because I had been bowling on last week and he guessed the same thing, and gosh, darn itt, but you're both wrong. It sounds like megafauna. It sounds like something big. Maybe it is something big, but you want to hear what the answer is, Sorer, you got any more guesses? Alright? The answer is cassowary so I should have known that. Oh God, I'm an idiot. I

love the cast wary. I will go to the zoo just to see the cast a wary because they're so piste off all the time. They're angry, angry animals. So castwaries are large, flightless, blue faced ornerary birds with a five inch long dagger like toe claw they can use to stab you. They grew up to six ft tall, which is about one eights and they way up to one and thirty pounds which is about fifty eight. You do not want to get into a fight with a cassowary. Uh.

They are big living dinosaur wars. They will destroy you easily. They're the closest thing we have to a velociraptor in the modern world. And they have this prehistoric plate on the top of their heads, so confusing and weird. The cask yes, and they are unlike testicles hanging from their neck, which is also very strange, like these wattles whatever those are. And they are uh, super territorial, so like they're ready

to kill anything. People get killed by these things in New Guinea all the time because at the water to a cassewary's territory. They'll just come and eviscerate you with their toe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they live in a New Guinea. They also, of course live in Australia. Australia has always got to have a little taste of some of the most dangerous animals. Um and they produce the lowest frequency bird call in the world. In fact, sometimes they're rumbling.

Territorial call is so low it's beyond the range of human hearing. Sometimes it's one of those things where like young like kids can hear it, but adults can't because as we get older, our hearing gets worse and worse. So like sometimes like a young person will be able to hear the sound better than an older person. Uh but yeah, so you know, it is of part of the reason that they can produce this lot very loud and low frequency. Is that prehistoric thingy on your their

head that you describe, It's called a cask. It is a hard, keratinist, thin like protrusion on the top of their heads that is hollow with some sort of fibrous tissue on the inside that helps amplify these terrifying calls. It's yeah, it is definitely one of those things I mean, birds technically are dinosaurs. We don't really think of them as dinosaurs. Um. But when you think about like a t rex or a velociraptor and you hear a cassaware,

you're like, oh yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, that's a dinosaur. Yeah, the relationship is much much clearer. You think about like, well, would it really be too scary to live in dinosaur times? And you come face to face with the cassowary, and it's like, yeah, no, it'd be bad. It's suck pretty hard. I encourage anyone to that knows that they have a zoo nearby with the castowary at it is to go see that zoo in that cast a wary, because they

look like they want to murder everybody there. They're never at any point or they like that's fine, I'm just in this. Like all the other animals come to some sort of resignment where they just sort of sit there and they accept there in this cage, not the cast wary. The castowary will pace and look at you like it wants to kill you, because it does. Haven't forbid, I haven't forbid. You have other animals that like, are wild? Are the wild? At the zoo. Like somebody squirrels or

peacock's getting these individual cages. You will be in luck because the cast wary will chase that and try and kill it. It's incredible. Yeah, yeah, it's uh. They are I think the most murderous uh animal in terms of I don't even know if they have the highest kill rate. I don't think so. That's probably like the small black footed cat or something. But they certainly have the intent. I think the most, the most blood lust of any animal I get just radiating off of a cassowary. I've

changed my mind. No longer the beaver fan. I want a cast a wary. Between getting shipped by a cassowary foot and getting my femoral artery severed by a beaver tooth, I don't know. I don't know what's what would be worse, but so uh, we have another mystery sound for you guys to try to guess for next week. Here is a hint for this one. They may sound like a ringwraith, but these passionate fellows have something other than Frodo on the mind. Yeah all right, so that's that's nice. That's cozy,

relaxing nature sound. I love to relax with some nature sounds like right before going to bed. And just so, so when you got any guesses for who's talking, Yeah, I gotta guess. I'll bleep you out if you get it right, So don't hold back. Zebra, it might be a will to be I think it's a zebra. It is not a zebra. I guess I probably shouldn't have said that, but I guess that's another hint it's not a zebra. So there you go, but very good guess.

Uh uh. And of course I will reveal the answer to the guests used talking contest next Wednesday on the new episode of Creature feature. Soar, and thank you so much for joining me today to talk all about beavers. I feel like we could talk for hours about beavers. Just there's just so much to say. There's so much to say about the noble beaver. But so, where can people find you to give you all their beaver takes? You can find me. Uh well, First for you can

listen to my podcast with Daniel O'Brien. Um. We talked about animals very rarely, so if you're having an animal overdose, you can come and visit. Sounds dumb and boring you can visit uh Quick Question with Soren and Daniel and you can also find me on Twitter at sore and Underscore Ltd. If you want to send in your guesses, like I said earlier, you can write an at Creature feature Pot at gmail dot com, Creature feature Pot on Instagram,

Creature feet Pot on Twitter. That's eighteen. That's something very different. And if you are in join the show and you want to leave a rating or review, I do so appreciate it. I read all the reviews and they warm my heart. Uh and yeah, thank you so much for listening. And thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song ex Solumina. Freat show features a production of I

Heart Radio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the I heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or Hey, guess what where have you listen to your favorite shows? I don't judge, it could be anywhere. I um it's That's not my place to tell you where to listen to your podcast. See you next Wednesday.