The Beavers Of Broadway!

The thrill of finding wild things near civilization when most of their kind has been driven far away by it comes seldom to Nature lovers. One can easily understand the surprise of the hunters who, several years ago, bagged four moose within ten miles of Ottawa, Canada's capital; but imagine the joy of finding a large beaver colony house within twenty miles of Broadway and 42nd Street! Charles Livingston Bull, the well-known illustrator of wildlife subjects, and Irving Krump, author of juvenile stories, made this discovery. It is on a small running brook surrounded by marshes, just over the hill west of the old town of Oradell, New Jersey. As near as the writer can discover, it is the only beaver group to be reported in this locality during the last two centuries. As a boy, I used to go fishing in and skating on a slough just off the Hackensack River which has always been called "Beaver Pond".

Tradition has it, according to my great-grand-uncle, that beavers were plentiful there before the Indians were driven out. While ploughing in that field, just off the edge of "Beaver Pond", my great-grand-uncle discovered many Indian relics, arrow-heads, hammer-stones, and ax-heads and also a very unusual stone anvil. Mother used to follow the plough furrow to pick these up. The old records of New Amsterdam (New York City under the Dutch) show that the Ackkinkas-hacky Indians traded beaver pelts extensively with the Hollanders, so that the reaches of the Hackensack River must have harbored many of the animals then.

But no other accounts of beaver appear from the late 1600's to the present. The newly found creatures seem to have come to stay, having built a large hut of reeds, sticks, mud, leaves and black ditt right in the edge of the running brook where they can cruise up and down stream to feeding growths. They also have dug a canal about one foot across in a straight line up into the dry ground. They doubtless use this in going back and forth to the young birches on the higher ground.

There is little to explain how this colony came to New Jersey. Perhaps they migrated down from the Adirondacks, or perhaps from the Bear Mountain preserves where the engineers have been having considerable trouble with these persistent water workers through their building dams that the park officials do not want, or burrowing under dams where the park officials do want them. However, there they are and welcome, too.