A Beaver Celebration

Beaver Celebration CD

The new CD is available to stream on CD Baby. To order a CD contact Bandcamp



The Beaver Brigade: Stephen Anderson (guitar), Robert Bailey (vocals, bass), Ben Blechman (violin), Mick Doherty (vocals, hammer dulcimer), Laura Kemp (vocals, guitar), Don Latarski (electric guitar, soprano guitar, banjitar), Jason Palmer (percussion), Dan Ross (percussion), Cal Scott (harmonica), and The Children of Fire Mountain School (2022).



Read the Lyrics

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Bring Back Beaver

Castor Canadensis, the North American Beaver, is one of the most amazing animals on our blue planet.  For 40,000 years across the Northern Hemisphere they have created astonishing habitats that benefit all of us who are fortunate to live in beaver country. 

Having grown up in Oregon’s back country, from a young age I’ve been interested in the natural world. One of my mentors, Will H. Brown, was regional director of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. He restored beaver to Steens Mountain Wilderness on Oregon’s High Desert just before the outbreak of WWII, and he had a deep and abiding love and respect for beaver. I have also become a “beaver believer.”

Most Americans would be shocked to learn Hudson’s Bay Company deliberately created a “beaver desert,” trapping them for their pelts across the Pacific Northwest in an effort to discourage settlers from following trappers into the region. Their plan was a success in eliminating beaver, but not in discouraging pioneers. The beaver populations once so plentiful across the Pacific Northwest, have never recovered over these intervening years, and until recently haven’t received our essential support. Beaver are a keystone species, essential to enhancing our watersheds in this time of climate change. They should be celebrated and honored and of course protected until they have repopulated their historical neighborhoods. Bring back beaver, NOW!

— Stephen Anderson

Photo by Neal Maine. See more of his work at Fairweather House & Gallery.

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Eager, a new book by Ben Goldfarb

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Neal Maine, photographer

After a thirty-year career as an award winning biology teacher at Seaside High School, Neal Maine became the first executive director of North Coast Land Conservancy, which he co-founded in 1986. Since his retirement from the land trust in 2010, he has pursued his passion for nature photography through PacificLight Images, a partnership with Michael Wing, dedicated to raising awareness of coastal ecology and the wildlife with whom we share the region’s estuaries, freshwater wetlands and forests. Their photography centers around coastal and Columbia River landscape, ecology and the rich estuary habitat with the surrounding wetlands and forest systems..