In 1948 the town of McCall, Idaho, was booming — but they had a big problem. An expanding population of beavers kept building dams in nearby creeks, causing the town to flood.
Fortunately, an Idaho Fish and Game warden named Elmo Heter cared about animals and had a flair for problem solving. When his original plan to move many of the beavers to a wilderness area backfired because horses used to transport the beavers couldn’t make it over the intervening mountains, he had to rethink what to do.
Genius often takes the form of putting together two totally unrelated things. Elmo’s community had too many parachutes left over from World War II, and he came up with the outrageous, creative idea of parachute-dropping the beavers into Idaho’s backcountry.
This book tells the true story with captivating simplicity for readers ages four to eight. One page spread, for instance, tells us that Elmo caught a test beaver, named him Geronimo, and put him in a box. We see the box falling from an airplane, over and over, and in three successive frames we learn, “It worked / and it worked / and it worked” — as Geronimo emerges unscathed.
Renderings of Elmo’s detailed designs, interspersed with pictures that include adorably drawn beavers, plunk readers right down amid this grand experiment. Its success is heartening: “What Geronimo and his seventy-five friends created [in their new home] is part of the largest protected roadless forest in the continental United States.”
The concluding Author’s Note by Kristen Tracy gives more details about translocation of animals and the Chamberlain Basin, where the beavers took up new residence. For readers who want to investigate further, a dozen selected resources follow.
In her acknowledgments, Tracy praises the fabulous illustrations: “Huge thanks to Luisa Uribe, who brought the story to life with illustrations that are so accurate and stunning that I want to turn them into a pantsuit and wear this book to special events … .” In their mutual efforts, Tracy and Uribe have brought forward a story of visionary problem-solving, kindness, and reverence for nature that will have kids sitting on the edge of their seats to learn what happens.
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