Adventist Adventurer Awards and Answers/Beaver

Beaver
Eager Beaver

What does a beaver use its tail for?

Beavers have a large flat tail that helps them steer through the water. When beavers chew on trees they use their tail like a kick stand to give them support. When a beaver feels threatened by danger it will slap its tail on the water as a warning of the predator. Beavers also store fat in their tails for the long, cold winters.

www.wildernessclassroom.com/wilderness-library/beaver/

Why do beavers have such big front teeth?

To gnaw through tree trunks, they need extra-strong teeth. Fortunately, their tooth enamel contains iron, which makes them incredibly strong, sharp, and orange.

What do beavers eat?

Beavers eat the leaves, inner bark, and twigs of aspen (a favorite food), alder, birch, cottonwood, willow, and other deciduous trees. Beavers also eat shrubs, ferns, aquatic plants, grasses, and crops, including corn and beans.

How do beavers cut down trees? Move large logs?

A) With nothing but its four front teeth

the beaver can cut down a small tree in minutes

However, when a tree is a bit larger in diameter, beavers prefer to cut the trunk to a point and then let the wind blow the tree down.

B) Beavers can transport their own weight in material;

they drag logs along mudslides and float them through canals to get them in place.

How do beavers build dams? Why do they build them?

When beavers come into a new location, they first build dams across small streams. The dam traps water behind it and creates a pond. The purpose of the dam is to provide deep enough water for the beaver to build a safe home - called a lodge. Beavers don't live in dams, they build two different types of structures. They create a wide, cone-shaped lodge with underwater entrances to live in, and they build dams to provide them with areas of deep, calm water within which to build their lodge.

How is a beaver’s home made?

Beavers build their lodge in the middle of the pond, where the pond water provides safety from predators like bears and wolves. But the water level must also be deep enough not to freeze solid in the winter, because beavers live under the ice in the winter, accessing their lodge from underwater entrances and eating twigs and branches they have stored in their submerged larder.

Build a beaver dam using small sticks and glue or build a beaver lodge.

Builder lodge template using it also for animal home

Read a story about beavers, their families, and how parent beavers protect their young.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL5SD6z7AG8

How many babies does a mother beaver have? How soon after birth can baby beavers swim?

A) The mother in the family may give birth to between one and six kits every year.

B) His eyes open right away, and he has his teeth and his full coat of waterproof fur.

Because the kit is so well-developed, it is able to start swimming on the day.

A few days after its birth, it may leave the lodge with its mother or father.

Draw or color a picture of what a beaver’s lodge looks like, if you slice off one side of a typical beaver lodge.

http://www.supercoloring.com/pages/beaver-lodge

craft do a beaver puppet

Note: A beaver puppet is used by many to work on this chip. A nice puppet is available for sale here from AdventSource.