We continued to float slowly downwards, trapping beavers on our way almost as fast as we could wish. We sometimes brought in 60 in a morning. The river at this point is remarkably circuitous, and has a great number of islands, on which we took beavers. Such was the rapid increase of our furs, that our present crafts in a few days were insufficient to carry them, and we were compelled to stop and make another canoe….We find the timber larger, and not so thick. There are but few wild animals that belong to the country farther up, but some deer, panthers, foxes and wild-cats. Of birds there are great numbers, and many varieties, most of which I have never before seen. We killed some wild geese and pelicans and likewise an animal not unlike the African leopard, which came into our camp, while we were at work upon the canoe.

This is how James O. Pattie describes the Gila River of southern Arizona and New Mexico in the 1820s.

If you’ve ever read early accounts from the American West, you know that beaver were once everywhere. And where beaver go they change the land – most obvious in the short term is the cutting of trees and flooding of ponds, but dam building also reduces sediment, raises the water table, increases aquatic biodiversity, and sequesters carbon. Beaver meadows on the site of former ponds remain especially fertile land long after the beaver have moved on. It’s become something of a family hobby to mentally reconstruct what now dry valleys might have looked like when ponds and channels threaded across the bottoms.

All this is to say that I was already what Ben Goldfarb calls a Beaver Believer, but I think you don’t have to be one already to enjoy his book Eager: the surprising secret life of beavers and why they matter. Goldfarb has a journalist’s flair for storytelling, and the book has no shortage of memorable character sketches. But he’s also generous with footnotes for those who want to dig in more.

Eager does read like a collection of essays, so I’ll go ahead and break down the table of contents: “Appetite for Construction” introduces beaver behavior; “Dislodged” reviews evidence for the importance of beaver in our environmental history; “Deceive and Exclude” is about the difficulties of living alongside beaver and strategies for doing so; “The Beaver Whisperer” surveys relocation programs from the Idaho beaver drops to the modern Methow Beaver Project; “Realm of Dammed” covers the Hudson Bay Company’s beaver desert policy in the Pacific Northwest and modern programs using beaver dam analogs to attract beaver back and create better salmon habitat; “California Streaming” profiles Beaver Believers in California pushing against state and local government policies; “Make the Desert Bloom” discusses ranchers in Elko County, Nevada who’ve embraced beaver as a means to improve pasturage; “Wolftopia” complicates the story of beaver following the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone; “Across the Pond” tells how beaver were illegally reintroduced to Britain; “Let the Rodent Do the Work” is primarily about stream restoration and the barriers to welcoming beaver into the process.

It would be a great vacation read for your next camping trip.

Hey /u/dandan_noodles and /u/nilhaus can either of you speak on the consensus of the quality of Stephen Sears' work?

I picked up his work on the Peninsula Campaign and Lincoln's Lieutenants this week on sale after a quick searching on the phone in the store seemed to indicate positive reviews. Ive enjoyed reading some of both. Pretty purely mil history(and to my eye a fine example of it done very well) but was interested in a change after I finished Fall of the House of Dixie.

I got Killing the Rising Sun from my grandfather and looked it up. It seems that the whole series has been criticized for historical accuracy, so naturally I'm wary about reading this one. Is there any merit to reading it, or should I just not waste my time?

Edit: highly recommend Hitler's American Model, though. It's a fascinating and chilling read.

I am looking for a good book in English on the German Revolution following WWI to the founding of the Weimar Republic.

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