This spring marks 50 years since the beaver reached this exalted status. Were O’Sullivan alive today, he’d surely be gratified by its persistent grip, literally and figuratively, on our collective soul and heart and emotions. Beaver imagery permeates every aspect of our culture: clothing, food, art, advertising, branding, entertainment. More than 1,000 places in Canada are named for the beaver. On the land, beavers continue to shape and reshape terrain, in ways that are both challenging and instructive. They may even have a role to play in helping the country move forward with some of the most important issues of the day: reconciliation, halting biodiversity loss and coping with a changing climate. Little wonder that in a poll done for Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017, the beaver was chosen as the “most Canadian” animal. 

Yet commemorating this milestone is also a tricky task. The 1975 act may have given the squat, brown, furry, flat-tailed, buck-toothed, dam-building rodent official national symbol status, but by then the beaver’s potency as a national icon was already deeply entrenched, some of it predating Canada’s creation by centuries. Parliament declaring it just made it official.

Much of that earlier imagery was directly tied to Canada’s colonial history. Beavers were the prized commodity that drove the fur trade, propelling Europeans ever deeper into the interior to collect pelts to make fashionable men’s hats back across the Atlantic. The Hudson’s Bay Company’s coat of arms, presented in 1671, a year after the company’s founding, sports four beavers. Canada’s first postage stamp, issued in 1851, 16 years before Confederation, was the Three-Pence Beaver; it was based on a sketch of the beaver by Sandford Fleming (no small figure who also invented time zones and engineered some of Canada’s early railways).

Part of the story stretches back even further. The beaver — amik to the Anishinaabe, amisk to the Cree — and beaver imagery, that of the ubiquitous, wise and resourceful landscape engineer have been part of Indigenous traditions and teachings on this continent for millennia. The beaver is the “one that brings the water,” as described by Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin. Indigenous Peoples in North America also invented the canoes that were adapted and exploited to become the main vehicles of the fur trade. And these two Canadian symbols, the beaver and the canoe, have been intimately linked since. 

In the decades that followed, Canada boomed. And so did our continued embrace of the beaver, in commerce, performance, even athletic competition (see sidebar). However, learning, or in some ways re-learning, how to live with the beaver has been a slower process. Yet it’s one area where some say greater urgency is needed — and with it, a new way of looking at the beaver and what it might symbolize — as impacts of climate change, particularly drought, more intense rainfall and warming of the Far North, grow more severe. 

Consider drought and Simpson’s description of the beaver as “the one that brings the water.” Glynnis Hood came to see what this meant while doing PhD research in Alberta in 2002. “We had the worst drought on record. I happened to be doing field data collection, and I was like, ‘these ponds are disappearing.’ Then I started to notice that the ponds with beaver still had water in them.” Further study across the province revealed that ponds with beavers had nine times more open water than those without.

The difference is due partly to dams. But another beaver skillset is equally important: they excavate pond bottoms and dig canals into the surrounding landscape. “In certain types of wetlands, they dig kilometres of canal systems,” says Hood. When there’s rain after a drought, it’s these canals that bring the water. 

At the other extreme, these same beaver-engineered landscapes also show a capacity to reduce severe flash floods caused by intense rainfall. In 2013, when Calgary suffered its worst flooding in over a century, Cherie Westbrook, an ecohydrology professor at the University of Saskatchewan who had been doing field work in the Kananaskis region, discovered it could have been even worse were it not for the beaver dams upriver from the city. Despite the deluge, roughly seven of every 10 of those dams upriver remained intact and were still holding back water after the storm. Today, Hood and Westbrook are doing joint research to learn more about this capacity. Hood says conventional wisdom still argues for beaver dam removal in the belief that they will all give way in storms, making flooding worse. “We’re trying to put a scientific evaluation on that, rather than just a rhetorical one,” she says.