A gift of an American Beaver skeleton
By
Jennifer
Callaghan
on
October 10, 2018
Late last February (2018), we received an email from a community member about a beaver found dead in Riverside Park. This news was especially disheartening to us considering the near celebrity status the Milwaukee River Greenway beaver couple had gained not only publicly, but amongst staff. We had watched the activities of the beavers in Riverside Park for nearly five years and enjoyed hearing the stories from other staff and community members about their encounters.Learning about the death of one-half of the beloved couple seemed like an unnecessarily harsh way to end a long Wisconsin winter. Adding insult to injury, while going out to pay our respects to the beaver, we found it a mere three feet from the entrance to its ice-blocked den – as if it was trying to make its way back home to safety but met with misfortune first.