Alan Gofinski

Like within a couple of months, there'll be cattails and lily pads and swamp roses blooming.

Wow.

Okay, so just to recap everything these funky little guys are doing to the world around them.

Their dams are cleaning the water, cooling the air, making the soil richer, and increasing biodiversity in these pretty dramatic ways.

Yep.

But that's it, right?

There can't be anything else.

There's so much more.

Our next storyteller thinks beavers can even fight fire.

Find out how after this break.

No, this is not an old-fashioned cartoon.

It's something that our governments actually did in the 1940s and 50s.

Some folks in a couple of different states put them in boxes and then dropped those boxes out of airplanes with parachutes on them and let them land in the mountains to do good for us, like move them from the cities to the mountains.

You're kidding right now, right?

They literally pushed them out of planes.

Idaho did this.

California did this.

This is Dr. Emily Fairfax, and she explains that this was the government's weird idea for pest control.

They took beavers that were being nuisances, turning people's yards and farmlands to swamps, and then just dropped them off in the mountains.

Instead of, like, taking them out on a horseback or a car, they dropped them out of planes.