12 January

I’m going to talk about beavers here, so get your smutty little chuckles out of the way first. Australia needs beavers. On just about every other continent, beavers almost single-handedly do what we can only clumsily try to do with earthmoving equipment. They not only hydrate the entire landscape, they also filter the water and prevent it flooding. They’re geniuses of water engineering. And unlike human dams, their dams are constantly maintained and shifted as needed. This side of animals - their actual engineering of the landscape - is so often missed.