"Full-color photographs and simple text describe beaver lodges"--Provided by publisher.

Beavers are nature’s engineers, and their industriousness begins at home! These busy animals work tirelessly to create elaborate lodges. Though they’re important sites of food storage, safety, and raising kits, beaver homes also create and sustain ecosystems. This book, which was written to support elementary science curricula, allows readers to explore important science concepts, including habitat welfare and relationships in the natural world. Readers will learn about beavers’ behavior, appearance, survival tactics, and their hardworking spirit. Colorful images, fact boxes, and diagrams offer opportunities for additional learning.

Introduces the physical characteristics, habits, and natural environment of the North American beaver.

Building a beaver lodge takes a lot of work. Learn about the many steps involved and why beavers have earned the idiom "as busy as a beaver." This fun and informative STEAM book makes it easy for parents and teachers to introduce STEAM to their youngest learners. Created in collaboration with Smithsonian, this book uses real-world examples to make STEAM topics easier to understand. It features an age-appropriate STEAM activity that is perfect for makerspaces and introduces kindergartners to the steps of the engineering design process. It helps beginning readers learn to read and is ideal for kindergarten students or ages 4-6.

The Eurasian beaver was near extinction at the start of the twentieth century, hunted across Europe for its fur, meat and castoreum. But now the beaver is on the brink of a comeback, with wild beaver populations, licensed and unlicensed, emerging all over Britain.

“Unexpectedly delightful reading—there is much to learn from the buck-toothed rodents of yore” (National Post). Beavers, those icons of industriousness, have been gnawing down trees, building dams, shaping the land, and creating critical habitat in North America for at least a million years. Once one of the continent’s most ubiquitous mammals, they ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Rio Grande to the edge of the northern tundra. Wherever there was wood and water, there were beavers—sixty million, or more—and wherever there were beavers, there were intricate natural communities that depended on their activities. Then the European fur traders arrived. Once They Were Hats examines humanity’s fifteen-thousand–year relationship with Castor canadensis, and the beaver’s even older relationship with North American landscapes and ecosystems. From the waterlogged environs of the Beaver Capital of Canada to the wilderness cabin that controversial conservationist Grey Owl shared with pet beavers; from a bustling workshop where craftsmen make beaver-felt cowboy hats using century-old tools to a tidal marsh where an almost-lost link between beavers and salmon was recently found, it’s a journey of discovery to find out what happened after we nearly wiped this essential animal off the map, and how we can learn to live with beavers now that they’re returning. “Fascinating and smartly written.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America's lakes and rivers. Goldfarb shares the powerful story about one of the world's most influential species. He explains 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. -- adapted from jacket