We spent a beautiful afternoon this week at Beaver Marsh, an area within the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It is a wide vista of cattails and marsh grass with a wooden boardwalk that runs through. It is a lovely, serene place to watch herons fishing, ducks dabbling, and lily pads spreading out their hopscotch invitation to walk on water.
But this paradise used to be a junkyard. It had started out as part of the Ohio and Erie Canal, but by the 1980's was an auto repair lot - a decrepit graveyard of twisted metal and rusting cars. When the National Park Service bought the land they didn't know how they were going to use it. And that's when beavers gave them the answer.
Beavers, which had been gone from the Ohio Valley for almost a hundred years, began returning. They set about their work - felling trees, building dams, and turning an ugly swath of scarred land into a 70 acre wetland.
I read that the drought stricken people in California are considering "importing" beavers to help restore critical water supplies. To some, that might seem like a fantastical scheme. But when I think about our Beaver Marsh, I know that they are calling out the perfect crew for the job.
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