I’ve studded my Netflix queue with your suggestions, and the Beavers* movie a couple of you raved about sounded so intriguing we bumped it to the top of the list.

Whoa.

Stunning movie. The cinematography will knock your socks off. I kept thinking, this can’t be real, it’s like really good CGI…But it’s real. Up close, delightfully personal, and captivating. Rose and Beanie watched the movie three times, I think. (It isn’t very long, alas.) And I snuck in an encore viewing myself—I couldn’t resist showing it to Scott, you see.

There were beavers on the undeveloped land surrounding our old neighborhood; they had a big lodge downstream of the place the kids called the Rock Store, named after a splashy afternoon spent collecting and displaying stony wares on a big flat boulder where the creek ran wide.  To get to the Rock Store, you had to hike through a field that had once been young woods. The beavers had turned it to meadow, and we marveled at the stubby, pointy tree trunks left behind, so exactly like pictures we’d seen in books.

As the creek wended its way toward the marshy basin where a bald eagle was rumored to fish, it gurgled past trees whose lower trunks had been wrapped with chicken wire: the attempt of a concerned neighbor to save our woods from the enterprising beaver clan. Undaunted, the beavers turned their attention to a location half a mile away, where slender trees shaded the small pond that welcomes people into the neighborhood. One by one, those trees began to topple.

The film’s narrator remarked that after humans, beavers wreak more change upon the landscape than any other animal.

They dance, too; did you know that?

Excellent tip, ladies. I hadn’t realized you could get IMAX films on DVD—you can bet we’ll be checking out a good many more. The whales movie, for starters…

*Link added per Brigid’s request…always happy to oblige our Brigid!