Busy Beavers Building, Part 1

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This post courtesy BBC Earth. For more wildlife news, find BBC Earth on Facebook and Posterous.

It’s at this time of year when many of us batten down the hatches and prepare for the chilly months ahead! Pulling shut the windows and doors, building a roaring fire and snuggling up under our coziest of blankets is at the top of our priority list. But how does that compare with the animal kingdom?

Beavers, unlike many of their closest kin which include marmots and squirrels, do not hibernate and live up to their name, keeping busy and working hard to make sure that their winter lodges, much like our homes, are solid, secure and most of all, full of seasonal essentials such as a fully stocked larder and a tailor-made chimney!

Yet to say that beavers are masters of their trade is a huge understatement! Alongside humans, beavers do more to mould and shape their landscape than any other animal. Not only do they fell trees in strategic locations for specific purposes of their own, but they are also responsible for engineering many woodland ponds which bring new life to other animals, and plants alike.

In this first video of our beaver series, we see our family working flat out to prepare their pond for the Wyoming winter!

Return here to see what happens next. Will the dam spring a leak? Will the pond be deep enough? And who invited the muskrats? All will be revealed here soon.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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