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Almost three months ago, I wrote a little post musing about the damage to some trees in and about the stream by the side of our little rural road, along the route that I take for my daily walks. It’s a delightful setting, a place where I can imagine Ratty and Mole adventuring and Toad decompensating over the smallest things, while Badger wanders around lugubriously trying to pick up all the pieces, sort everyone out, and carry on as normal. I have no doubt Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s cottage is in the undergrowth somewhere, and I think I’ve seen Jeremy Fisher sitting on the bank catching flies with his tongue.
So I was somewhat alarmed to see my little paradise disturbed as the trees were being systematically felled, one by one. I posited beavers as the culprits and wrote a short post, asking for feedback and opinions as to what was going on. With a singular (and spiritedly argumentative but ultimately unconvincing) exception, you all agreed with me that the damage was being caused by beavers.
Since then, I’ve had a little trail camera set up at what looked like one active condestruction site or another, trying to grab a stealthy photo of the guys at work. No dice. Clearly, these beavers know how to evade the paparazzi. They are the Greta Garbo of beaverdom. All they want is to be left alone. They’ve chewed through the strap holding the camera to the tree trunk. They’ve flung the thing five or six feet in the wrong direction. They’ve unmoored it from whatever was fastening it to the ground, or whatever was propping it up, and carefully placed it face down, times without number.
But, today, for once in my life, I got lucky. Actually, I’m lucky almost every day on these walks. In the past week, I’ve seen innumerable deer, three or four different kinds of ducks, including a couple of little duck families swimming around with their babies, a heron standing on one leg and darting its head under the water to catch whatever it is that heron catch, a flock or two of geese, and a mink crossing the road right in front of me. Oh, and a couple of baby muskrats playing on the stream bank.
Today, though, I thought was rather a dull day, until I turned at the halfway point and headed for home. A minute or two later, et voila! Beaver. Two of them actually. Snapped a photo with my phone, just before they caught sight of me and splashed their way back into the water.
So mystery (not that there was much of one) solved.
Beaver.
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Recently, one of our members mentioned that it was imperative to return the GOP away from its current path and urged a return, not just to the principles of Reaganism, but also to fall further back to the days of Dwight Eisenhower. The University of California-Santa Barbara runs an online archive of political documents pertaining to the history of the American executive called the 
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Years ago, the head of a very large company’s IT department lived by the maxim: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” So, the department’s managers decided to count completed work requests (aka “tickets”) as proxies for progress.
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The Penal Laws were acts passed during the 17th and 18th century by the Parliament of England and Wales gradually eroded and then viciously reduced the civil liberties of nonconforming Protestants and Catholics in the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. Its most long-lasting and profound effects were felt in Ireland, where the laws were designed to obliterate the dignity of Roman Catholics and reduce beaten, defenseless, and powerless Irish Catholics into a third-class of citizenry. The Penal Laws created a form of apartheid long before South Africa and the American South.
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