Beavers have many different symbolic possibilities. In particular, our culture tends to associate beavers with industriousness, as in the expression “busy as a beaver.” In slang usage, this animal also has sexual connotations. Finally, beavers build dams which, because emotions are often symbolized by water, can indicate building emotional barriers.
(Castor fiber), a mammal of the order of rodents. The beaver is well adapted to a semiaquatic way of life. Its body measures as much as 100 cm in length, its tail 30 cm in length, and its weight 30 kg. The tail, thickened from the top down, is up to 15 cm wide and almost hairless, but covered with large horny scutes. The toes on the hind legs are joined by a wide swimming membrane. The beaver has a valuable pelt, consisting of shiny coarse awn hairs and a very thick silky undercoat. The color ranges from light chestnut to dark brown or sometimes black (melanism).
In prehistoric times beavers were distributed throughout most of Europe, southern Siberia, and parts of Middle Asia, as well as through almost all of North America. (The American beaver is apparently a special type of C. canadensis.) As a result of rapacious trapping, only defined settlements of beavers are preserved in Europe and Asia; in North America beavers are quite numerous. Until 1917 there were only a few hundred beavers in the USSR. Because of preservation and reclamation the population of beavers in the USSR grows every year and had reached 50,000 by the 1960’s. Beavers are encountered in most of the oblasts of the European part of the USSR and in some raions of Siberia. (There the range of beavers is increasing slowly.) Beavers live along quiet forest rivers with banks overgrown by willows, pines, birch, poplars, and other trees, the sprouts and bark of which the beavers feed on most of the year. In the summer they eat grass. They are able to cut down thick trees. They live in earthen dens and in “lodges”—heaps of twigs, silt, and earth (up to 2.5 m high and 12 m at the base), with several internal chambers and underwater entrances. On small rivers they build dams and cut canals to float the branches and stumps of the trees they fell. They are monogamous and have a gestation period of 105–107 days. The young (three or four to a litter) are born half-blind and well covered. They can swim after a day or two. Beavers live up to 35 years (in captivity). They are valued for their beautiful, warm, and very durable fur. In the USA there is severely limited hunting of the animals. In the USSR beaver preserves have been created (the Voronezh, Byelorussian, and Kondo-Sos’vin preserves). Because of the growth of the population in the USSR, severely limited trapping of beavers for their pelts was begun in places in the 1960’s.
V. G. GEPTNER