Forget about ants, I have a new animal obsession: the beaver. A few hours ago my Netflix account recommended--based on my interest in Blue Planet and Raising Arizona--that I watch the recently released DVD version of the 1988 IMAX starring the busy semi-aquatic builders. And because I dutifully do everything my Netflix tells me to, I watched it.
Beavers (The Biggest Dam Movie You Ever Saw) was cute; I'll give it that. But beyond that, the movie is short, and the picture it paints of beaver life is painfully shallow. It raised a lot more questions than it answered. I know beavers make dams, but how? How do they choose the spot? How do they carry those huge trees? How do they know where to put the wood? Do the males and females take on different building roles? How do they decide where to put their home? What are the advantages for the beavers of the drastic changes they make in the ecosystem around them? How do they rebuild when a bear attacks the dam??????????
I was also puzzled by the tameness of the interactions between the beavers, the cameras and the other animals in the film. Why didn't the bear eat the beaver? Why didn't the skunk scent the beaver? How could there possibly be a situation where a beaver fells an aspen with a bear cub still in it????????
