The author’s extensive, long-term tracking of wild beaver colonies documents intimate family relationships and complex colony hierarchies highlighting how beavers serve as primary forces against drought and climate shifting by engineering vital, biodiverse wetlands.
THE LOVE OF BEAVERS
by Matthew Perry
Atria Books, March 2028
(via Writers House)
When conservationist and naturalist Matthew Perry arrived at Spring Farm CARES Nature Sanctuary in central New York, he believed he had been hired to restore a damaged landscape by hand—replanting forests, repairing streams, rebuilding bird habitat after two centuries of agricultural depletion. Instead, on his very first day, he met the true agents of restoration: a young pair of beavers newly released onto the land. Within months, they accomplished what no human-designed plan could, transforming a narrow farm stream into a living wetland system.
What began as a practical collaboration became a twenty-six-year relationship spanning three generations of beavers—and a profound shift in how to understand wildlife, restoration, and intelligence beyond the human realm. THE LOVE OF BEAVERS chronicles the lives of a single, multi-generational beaver colony with rare intimacy, following individuals, family lines, and learned traditions across decades of floods, droughts, loss, recovery, and renewal.
The world is just becoming hip to the importance and appeal of beavers. Perry’s posts of ongoing field observations, images, and short-form narrative videos regularly draw hundreds of thousands to millions of views, including a single beaver-focused post that has reached more than 10 million viewers.
As the beavers go about their lives, the land responds. The book documents this transformation from the inside, revealing rewilding not as a technical intervention but as a relationship—one rooted in patience, trust, and shared time.
Matthew Perry has served for over twenty-five years as Conservation Director and Resident Naturalist at Spring Farm CARES Nature Sanctuary, overseeing a 260-acre rewilding project shaped largely by beaver-engineered wetlands. He is President of Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife, a national nonprofit dedicated to coexistence-based conservation, and President of the Utica Peregrine Falcon Project. The Spring Farm beavers will be featured in an upcoming PBS documentary, and the BBC has expressed interest in filming the colony in 2026.
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Along highways in the United States, monarch butterflies lay their eggs on milkweed during long-distance migrations, even as vehicles fly past at 70 mph. In a swirling mass of waste in the ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, fantastic and otherworldly creatures float alongside and on top of milk jugs. On the border of Israel and Syria, wolves find safety in minefields in the Golan Heights, where fragile explosives keep people away. And on a small Swedish island, the quiet presence of bird-watching tourists protects a lively seabird population from predators.