Ronan Donovan. Beaver.

Under winter ice, a beaver returns to its lodge carrying a stick from the family’s submerged food cache. Every branch visible here was cut and placed by these beavers in preparation for the frozen months, when surface access disappears. Stored underwater to remain fresh, the cache sustains them through winter. 

A beaver swims back to its lodge underneath the frozen surface of a creek in Bozeman, Montana. Beavers don’t hibernate, so they spend much of the fall creating an underwater stockpile of riparian plants like willow, alder, and aspen to feed on throughout the winter. Every stick in this image was placed by beavers, a feat of their busy habitat engineering. Remotely controlled camera setup.

Credit: Ronan Donovan

My work as a National Geographic Fellow, wildlife biologist, and conservation photographer has always been to mend the rift between modern humans and the more than human world. Through visual, written and spoken stories, I strive to capture the intimate rhythms of family bonds, shared challenges, and ancient behaviors that call us back to our wild selves. My photography and film reveal that the boundaries we imagine between ourselves and nature are illusions—reminding us, as Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote, “It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a “species loneliness”—estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night.” Rachel Carson said, “man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.