The Spirited Review

Lily Pond: Four Years with a Family of Beavers by Hope Ryden, Preface by Dr. Jane Goodall

Lily Pond is a testament to the social and intellectual life of the North American beaver. Like Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs, this chronicle of beaver relations proposes that if nonhuman animals act similarly to humans, then it is at least possible that they experience something akin to what human animals experience. Although "a good many scientists who willingly entertain the possibility that "intelligence" exists elsewhere in the universe are reluctant to see any sign of it in animals here on earth," Ryden herself clearly has no doubt that the beavers whom she watched for four years are intelligent and lead complex social lives.

The beavers of Lily Pond are delightful -- playful with one another, companionable, and cooperative. Over the course of four years, newborns arrive each spring, and the kits are cared for attentively and affectionately by all members of the family. Conflicts are resolved quickly and without violence, and the family appears to represent a dynamic, integrated whole. The beavers also exhibit some fairly complex cognitive skills including planning, recollection, and learning. Ryden follows the lives of the beavers as the family works and plays together; as kits mature and leave home, and sometimes return; as the family rebuilds the dam after human vandalism; as members are lost to vehicles and to old age, and as grown brothers and sisters form a new collective after the loss of their parents.

Her observation of the beavers brings Ryden to some interesting personal contemplations. When the female matriarch swims up and inspects the naturalist, giving Ryden a taste of what it is to be studied by a member of another, potentially dangerous species, her own discomfort causes her to consider the impact that her attentions might have, and whether she is right to subject other creatures to that scrutiny. Indeed, throughout the text Ryden is very thoughtful as she wrestles with her perceptions and projections, with her choices about when to intervene and when to remain aloof, with her longing to relate with the beavers and the need to keep them suspicious of humans. She exposes her doubts openly; whether or not the reader agrees with each of her choices, it is clear that she is rooted in compassion and in a commitment to do her best by the wild. In the short preface, Jane Goodall makes reference to Hope Ryden's "unashamed love" for the beavers of Lily Pond. Lily Pond is indeed graceful in its joyful interspecies appreciation, as well as in the manner in which it calmly yet thoroughly refutes the notion that we human beings are alone in our relational and intellectual capacities.

Ryden's journal is a dual entry, at once both an observation of beaver behavior and a reflection on our interactions with and interpretations of nonhuman species. A counter-offering to the many books that refuse the possibility that our fellow animals feel, think, and love, Lily Pond submits evidence that beavers, at least, engage with one another and with their surroundings in modes not so very dissimilar from our own.

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