No love lost for Canada’s emblematic animal
ALGONQUIN PROVINCIAL PARK, Ontario — The beaver may be one of Canada’s official national symbols, as iconic as the maple leaf, but Canadians have a love-hate relationship with the creature, with the emphasis for many more on the second emotion.
Some communities in Alberta offer bounties on beavers’ tails. A mayor in Quebec has called for them to be “eradicated.” Fingers of blame frequently point their way, rightly or wrongly, for highway washouts, including some with fatal consequences. Farmers look on with despair as their land vanishes beneath a beaver pond.
For the second time in the past 15 years, Colleen Watson watched this summer as beavers flooded a 100-acre woodlot in the Atlantic province of New Brunswick that her grandfather, a blacksmith, took as payment from a customer during the Great Depression.
“I love to see the nature, right? You can watch it do its thing,” Watson said in a tone more of exasperation than anger with the animal. “The hate is what it’s done to my property.”
The large rodent has played an outsize role in Canada’s history.
The push by Europeans to take control of what would become Canada from its Indigenous people was driven in large part by a mania for beaver-felt top hats, a craze that wiped out Europe’s population. For 200 years, one-third of Canada’s current territory was the exclusive trapping ground of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
After beavers almost went extinct by the mid-19th century, fashions shifted and Canada’s fecund beavers rebounded. They can now be found, more or less, in all of the country’s wooded areas, and in 1975, the beaver was declared an official symbol of Canada.
Beaver dams are the source of the most common complaints of beaver damage. When they are first built, the ponds flood formerly dry land. When a dam collapses — which typically only happens after beavers, excellent builders, abandon their pond — the rush of water can wreck rural roads and railways.
But some of the problems caused by beavers are more unusual, and those grab local headlines.
This year witnessed a number of notable episodes: Beavers chomped through a fiber-optic cable, cutting off internet service to Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia; and a subway station in Toronto was shut down after a lost beaver took a tour.
Figuring out just how much damage beavers cause each year is difficult, said Glynnis Hood, a professor of environmental science at the University of Alberta and an unabashed champion of beavers.
She was part of a research project that determined that beavers cost cities and towns in Alberta at least 3 million Canadian dollars a year, but she called that a “very, very low estimate” because many municipalities simply had no idea what they spent on beaver-related repairs.
Hood herself is no stranger to unwelcome beaver behavior. This year, a beaver family hauled away several trees from in front of her house.
“But, you know, trees grow back,” she said. “That’s the consequences of living right up against a very natural area.”
While the professor said she held no grudge against these famously industrious animals, she did have some sympathy for people who believe that “any beaver, regardless of whether it’s causing flooding or cutting trees, is one beaver too many.”
Once beavers arrive in your life, it can be difficult to dislodge them.
“I’ve talked to different people, and they said that once they’re in your land, it’s very, very hard to get them out,” said Watson, who is now trying to figure out a solution to remove them from her woodlot in New Brunswick.