Join your friends and neighbors in reading & discussing EAGER, journalist Ben Goldfarb's award-winning look at why beavers matter, during the One Book Steamboat community read
Each year Bud Werner Memorial Library presents a community read in Steamboat Springs. We call it ONE BOOK STEAMBOAT. This winter, the Yampa Valley community is invited to read and discuss the award-winning nonfiction book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, by journalist Ben Goldfarb. In addition, the Library is offering a series of events to enrich your reading experience and a Yampa Valley-wide conversation about resilience in our local environment, culminating with a live talk by author Ben Goldfarb on March 18 at the library.
Get your copy of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
The Library has ample copies of Eager circulating locally in our collection (including digital, audio and print copies). Books are available so everyone is able to check out a copy, read it and participate in the community conversations.
Borrow Eager as a book, audio book or ebook from Bud Werner Memorial Library.
Buy Eagerfrom Steamboat Springs' independent bookstore, Off the Beaten Path.
The book ~ Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
WINNER of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers”—including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens—recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are far healthier, for humans and non-humans alike, than those without them. From the Nevada deserts to the Scottish highlands, Believers are now hard at work restoring these industrious rodents to their former haunts. Eager is a powerful story about one of the world’s most influential species, how North America was colonized, how our landscapes have changed over the centuries, and how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and the ravages of climate change. Ultimately, it’s about how we can learn to coexist, harmoniously and even beneficially, with our fellow travelers on this planet.
Reviews:
“A marvelously humor-laced page-turner about the science of semi-aquatic rodents…. A masterpiece of a treatise on the natural world.”—The Washington Post
“Eager takes us inside the amazing world of nature’s premier construction engineer…and shows us why the restoration of an animal almost driven to extinction is producing wide-ranging, positive effects on our landscapes, ecology, and even our economy.”―National Geographic
“This witty, engrossing book will be a classic from the day it is published.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
"[Goldfarb] shares his findings in lucid and entertaining prose….Filled with hard facts and fascinating people (and animals), Eager is an authoritative, vigorous call for understanding and action."―Kirkus, Starred Review
The author ~ Ben Goldfarb
Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental journalist who covers wildlife conservation, marine science, and public lands management, as well as an accomplished fiction writer. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His nonfiction writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Science, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The Guardian, High Country News, Outside Magazine, Smithsonian, bioGraphic, Pacific Standard, Audubon Magazine, Scientific American, Vox, OnEarth, Yale Environment 360, Grantland, The Nation, Hakai Magazine, VICE News, and other publications. His fiction has appeared in publications including Motherboard, Moss, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Hopper, which nominated him for a Pushcart Prize. His nonfiction has been anthologized in The Best American Science & Nature Writing and Cosmic Outlaws: Coming of Age at the End of Nature. He holds a master of environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies andhe was a 2018 North American Congress for Conservation Biology journalist fellow. He lives in Colorado with his wife, Elise, and his dog, Kit — which is, of course, what you call a baby beaver.
Ben Goldfarb in Steamboat Magazine
Read the interview with Ben Goldfarb as he talks about his book and becoming a Beaver Believer in Steamboat Magazine.
Additional Beaver Resources
Our official One Book Steamboat beaver mascot illustration by Steamboat Springs artist Julia Ben-Asher.
Our StoryWalk this winter features The Lodge that Beaver Built by Randi Sonenshine! Our busy librarians channeled their inner busy beavers and built a StoryWalk worth the walk all winter long! The Lodge That Beaver Built brings to light the habits of this fascinating, important creature. Located along a side path off the Yampa River Core Trail near the Stockbridge Transit Center, Steamboat StoryWalk is an innovative way for families to enjoy stories together in the outdoors as you meander between parts of a deconstructed story that is placed at intervals along a walking trail.
Check out some beaver basicsfrom Colorado Parks & Wildlife (CPW). CPW announced plans to form an internal working group to initiate the beaver management planning process at the April 5, 2024 meeting in Denver, where Governor Polis expressed his support for CPW’s beaver conservation efforts. The state’s support for inclusive beaver management planning will set Colorado on a path to improve climate resilience while addressing critical social and economic considerations.
Learn more about the Colorado Beaver Working Group. If you want to stay up to date on all things beaver happening here in Colorado, including the Beaver Working Group's newsletter and info about upcoming meetings, join their Google group here.
READ MORE! Ben Goldfarb writes about beavers and beaver analogs in the Kawuneeche Valley (the west entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park), hopes for reinvigorating and rehydrating that wet valley ecosystem, and the obstacles of moose, humans and other environmental/political factors.
Follow beaver scientist Emily Fairfax in the news, podcasts and more!
The Beaver Restoration Guide published by the US Fish & Wildlife Service is available to download the pdf or read online.
The Beaver Instituteprovides tons of resources to learn about beavers, restoration efforts and our mutual habitat
Crawl in and visit the Eager Beaver Lodge in Library Hall
The Eager Beaver Lodge is open for interaction and education in Library Hall at Bud Werner Library through March 18, 2025.
It takes a Steamboat Springs village to build a beaver lodge! The Eager Beaver Lodge is a human collaboration between Bud Werner Library, Friends of the Yampa, The Nature Conservancy and Yampatika. This is our collective attempt to mimic the Yampa Valley’s ecosystem engineers: beavers.
Along the Yampa River and its tributaries, beavers (Castor canadensis) can live alongside the river in “bank dens,” or in lodges that rise up from the ponds of their own creation. This display is an interactive, simulated beaver lodge, created so our community can see and experience what it might feel like to be warm and dry inside a beaver’s lodge while looking out on surrounding dam, wetlands, and riverscapes.
Beavers live in lodges, not dams. Beavers build dams out of twigs, sticks, rocks, and mud, structured to slow down water flow in a river or a stream. A dam creates a pond, where they build a lodge to live in. Living in calm wetlands provides protection from predators like wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions.
Beavers use their ever-growing teeth to cut down nearby trees and branches. They drag their harvest to the water and swim with it to their lodge and dam sites. Then they squish mud between the logs and pat down the logs and mud to ensure everything is sturdy. Beavers are very industrious and, almost overnight, can build dams and excavate canals, making quick work of creating complex habitats. They continuously maintain their dams and lodges.
Beaver lodges typically include two entrances so they can escape from predators, plus a food cache, a food ledge to store food during colder months, and an air vent that helps keep the space cool during hot months and well-ventilated during the long cold winter. The size of a lodge varies depending on the size of the beaver colony and the size and type of building materials available.
THANK YOU!
Mural | “A Beaver’s View from the Lodge” by Julia Ben-Asher
Beaver chew & sticks | Courtesy of beavers at work around the headgates to the Walker Ditch, upstream of Hayden
Human engineering & lodge base construction | Courtesy of the shop teachers, construction gurus, plus teaching and facilities staff at Colorado Mountain College and Steamboat Springs High School: Si Axtell, Kipp Rillos & Paul Scoppa
Beaver taxidermy | Colorado Parks & Wildlife
Beaver artifacts | Yampatika & Bud Werner Library
Volunteers:
Thanks to Carpenter Ranch and Preserve Manager Matt Ross and his children, Baxter and Winnie, for their snowmobile power to dig out and drag the winter-bound beaver chew sticks for lodge construction.
Thanks to Chris Painter for sewing the lodge’s watery habitat.
Thanks to Jon Kocik for mural canvas carpentry.
Photo gallery: Building the Eager Beaver Lodge
Photo gallery: EAGER community read spawns a 2025 Winter Carnival beaver ice sculpture, “Illuminating the Yampa’s Best Friend” by Friends of the Yampa
A conversation with landscape ecologist Nick Kolarik about using NASA Earth observations to monitor impacts of beaver related conservation efforts in dryland systems
