Beaver Tales: Audrey Tournay and the Aspen Valley Beavers

For well over 30 years, Audrey Tournay has rescued and raised beaver kits. She successfully did what wildlife biologists told her was impossible: she reintroduced them to the wild.

Tournay is founder of the Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, where orphaned or injured moose, raccoons, ravens, skunks, foxes, fawns, woodchucks, muskrats, wolves, a lynx -- even a full-grown adult lioness -- have come into her care. Yet Tournay has a soft spot for beavers. That soft spot has occasionally been her bathroom, a makeshift den behind her woodstove, or on her lap. Her hands-on interaction with many beavers has given her a special understanding of these often misunderstood wetland animals.

These wonderful, moving and often very funny stories reveal life with one of North America''s most intelligent, innovative, and inventive wild creatures.

Audrey Tournay is founding director of the Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary. Her stories about rescued animals have appeared in short story format and in her weekly newspaper column, which ran for a decade. Before turning her attention to the welfare of wild creatures, Tournay worked as a teacher at the Berkley Institute in New York City and in schools across southern Ontario.

Sharing Beaver Tales has been both joy and privilege. Beavers are such wonderful beings! Even after all the years of knowing them, they still have much to teach me. Just now I have two orphaned beaver kits, Nipissing and Nipigon, who are the most stubborn, opinionated beavers I have ever known! (Though not siblings, they were both orphaned when their lodges, unwanted on golf courses, were dynamited.) Never before have I looked after beavers who did not like apples. These two prefer peaches -- which happen to be much more expensive. So I decided they would eat apples. I took all other food out of their enclosures. I cut two apples in half, and put them in front of the kits. And left them.

Half an hour later I returned. Four slices of apple, pushed through the wire, were lying uneaten on the floor. Nipissing and Nipigon were sitting on their big behinds, staring at me and waiting to be fed.

The day will come when, grown, these kits will swim away into the wild, and find the food that they prefer.

Meanwhile, I am enjoying them. Beavers are very, very special creatures.