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Description of  Hour of the Beaver

The author and her family have created a wildlife refuge — a modest 250 acres of stream-fed New Jersey marsh and woodland. Its most distinguished inhabitants are a handful of rare and remarkable beavers. In the author’s desire to observe, then know, and finally defend the beavers, the whole ecological crisis in America is reduced to the immediacy of a single plot of ground and a single species threatened with extinction. The author’s wildlife observations are illuminated by a respect for living things in their natural environment. Through patience and persistence, she shares with the beaver family the cycles of the seasons and of birth and raising their young, of working, foraging, and family play. In her evolution as an activist conservationist, she conveys a sense of the importance of preserving even “useless” wildlife. Over this idyllic setting hovers the constant threat of disaster. “Sportsmen” and fur trappers are determined to invade the sanctuary. One even deliberately sets a fire that threatens both wildlife and the author’s home in a particularly irresponsible act of resentment against the sanctuary. Coping with the “power structure,” however, is even more frustrating. Whether it is through the destruction-by-indifference of a county road project or the curiously warped approach of a “conservation” agency dominated by wildlife-reduction pressure groups, “progress” is the beavers’ most inexorable enemy. In Hour of the Beaver, Hope Sawyer Buyukmihci lifts the banner of hope that the struggle to preserve this embattled species is not yet hopeless. Her plea echoes from the New Jersey woods to a threatened bog in Illinois, to Hells Canyon and the California Redwood forests ... for the author makes clear that even if we never see a beaver or a Redwood, we need — somehow — to know they are still there outside our urban forests of concrete and smog. Note: Although this book is out of print, you may be able to locate it in some libraries or through a dealer. If you are in southern New Jersey, you can see a copy by visiting the Refuge.