In January 1975, a senator for New York introduced a bill to acknowledge the beaver as its state’s official animal. Well, harrumph, this did not go over well with Canadians, who had, for a couple of centuries, ‘claimed’ the beaver to be representative of all things Canadian: an industrious engineer and the base of our economy ever since the first European explorers tripped over this area.
In quick response to this threat of an American brazenly stealing our nation’s pride and joy, in March 1975, a private member’s bill was presented by MP Sean O’Sullivan to rightfully claim and protect the beaver icon to be our nation’s representative. On March 24, 1975, the Canadian Parliament made it so. Take that, ya upstart Americans! Elbows up, eh?
The beaver had been inserted into many company logos well before 1975: the Hudson’s Bay Company since way back when; Roots clothing, which outfitted the 1998 Canadian Winter Olympic teams with its beaver-branded clothing; and Parks Canada, which long had the beaver as its mascot. And many others, probably more so than even the Canada goose.
What surprised me a bit was that the beaver had shown up on Canadian nickels since 1937, well before the aforementioned American/Canadian beaver debacle of 1975. As a young collector of coins in the 1960s, I assumed that to be engraved on a coin, the subject must have already received royal assent. The things you learn later in life.
Beavers, and their ponds and dams, have always been interwoven as a part of my life, from tadpole catching to duck hunting to land surveying to being an integral part of conducting wetland evaluations. A day spent poking around a beaver pond, especially one within the Canadian Shield rock land, is a day to be savoured and remembered.
In the late 1980s, author Frank Westcott commissioned my wife, Juliana, to create illustrations for a book he was preparing about the life of a beaver colony he had been observing. This led to two years of intense exploring of beaver habitat, as Juliana always used her first-hand field sketches and personal photographs as a base for her illustrations. Her attitude has always been that “to breathe life into an art piece, the artist has to have lived the moment.”
And so, we visited just about everyone in central Ontario who gave us permission to poke and prod around the ponds on their properties. We tore open abandoned lodges to see what the inside living quarters were like for a beaver family; we travelled with trappers on the line to witness the centuries-old tradition of harvesting these big furbearers; we prepared skulls and skeletons to study the anatomy of these large mammals.
We even had the experience of waiting in the cold autumn night to have a pair of semi-tamed beavers climb on our laps looking for apple slices. Our first daughter was only four years old at the time, and she learned the skills of how to sit quietly and patiently in a canoe to be rewarded with awesome arm’s-length visits from a curious beaver.
By the time the book was published (The Beaver: Nature’s Master Builder (Hounslow Press, 1989), we had become quite immersed in the whole world of the beaver. And Julie had created quite the pile of graphite illustrations and watercolour paintings.
In my careers as land surveyor, farm hand, landscape ecologist, and conservation lands manager, there have been many instances when an errant beaver dam had to be broken to relieve some upstream flooding. Whether you are 12, 22, 32, 42, 52 or 62 years of age, busting beaver dams is a hoot.
In hindsight, no matter what the situation, the broken dam was almost always repaired and recreated bigger and stronger within a day or two. Beavers are like that. Elbows up, eh?
It was only 50 years ago that we, as a united nation, set the beaver on its glorious pedestal of being our Canadian icon of endurance and ingenuity. Sure, there were a few dissenters, but, hey, go buy another birch tree for the cottage if you have to.
When it comes to letting our neighbours to the south know we are proud of our collective heritage, keep your stick on the ice, your elbows up and, sometimes, when you have to, slap your tail on the water.