For a minute, we had absolutely no idea what we were looking at.
Something was moving along the far edge of the puddle. There was a dark shape in the water and what appeared to be a row of green plates sticking up from its back.
A dinosaur.
Obviously, there are several reasonable explanations for strange things moving through a small Iowa puddle, and dinosaur probably shouldn’t have been our first one.
But from where we were sitting, that is exactly what it looked like.
It took us a minute of watching before the mysterious creature finally made sense.
It was Chuck.
Our beaver was simply swimming along, carrying a leafy twig with him toward his own part of the puddle.
No prehistoric discovery. No new species requiring documentation. Just one of our familiar neighbors doing whatever important beaver business needed doing before the end of the day.
And somehow, I think I like the real explanation better.
Chuck wasn’t performing for us. He wasn’t visiting the feeders or coming close enough to make himself particularly noticeable. He had somewhere to go and something to carry, and for a few minutes we happened to witness a tiny piece of his ordinary life.
Although I reserve the right to continue referring to him as the Puddle Dinosaur whenever he swims by carrying greenery on his back.
Because once you’ve seen it, you really can’t unsee it.
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