This painting, by Dwayne James, is among my favorite. It is an obvious riff on the beaver tale paddle that used for canoes, but it is so much better. The rippling light on the water reminds me so much of our hours spent in the canoe that it has a special place in my heart already. but beavers are just made for canoes. Everybody knows that.
The whole news reel is wonderful but go to 5:32 to see what I mean.
Jon met a stranger on his hike in Franklin hills yesterday and they had friendly dogs so they chatted for a while. The two men talked about the trail, and talked about nature, and eventually got to the subject of Alhambra Creeks. The man brought up the beavers, which he had never seen. He thought he had heard that they had some kind of ‘Champion’ that lived in town, but he didn’t know who? Someone Perryman?
Heh heh heh. Beaver champion! I like it. Sometimes I feel like a champion. But definitely not the first or the foremost. One of the most famous beaver champions of all times is Grey Owl, (or Archie Bellamy). Who in addition to standing up for beavers made all of Canada feel foolish by convincing them he was was Apache, which he clearly was not. They haven’t recovered from the injury quite yet, but if you ask me they have no one to blame but themselves.
One look at the long frame and roman nose should have been enough to dispel any myths!
On Ajawaan Lake in Canada’s Prince Albert National Park, a conservationist who called himself Grey Owl lived in a cabin with beavers from 1931 to 1938. He faked a First Nations identity; the former trapper was actually an Englishman named Archie Belaney, though these details didn’t emerge until after his death.
After working as a fur trapper, wilderness guide, and forest ranger, he eventually dove into the world of conservation. His third wife (he’d already had two overlapping, failed marriages by the age of 37), a Mohawk Iroquois woman named Anahereo, helped convince him to make the switch from trapping beavers to advocating on their behalf.
Anahereo had accompanied him one day as he set up a trap to catch a mother beaver. The cries of the kits (baby beavers), which supposedly resembled the wails of a human child, caused her to beg him to release the mother. Though Grey Owl failed to heed to her requests because the pelt would earn them much-needed income, he did go back and locate the abandoned kits the next day. He and his wife raised them in their cabin.
Grey Owl went on to write several books about nature conservation, focused largely around a central theme of the negative effects of the commodification of the natural world. Grey Owl and Anahereo were featured in documentaries about their environmental work and became fairly well known among 20th-century conservationists within the United States and Canada. After Grey Owl died of pneumonia in 1938, the details of his fabricated First Nations identity came to light and tarnished his reputation.
Tarnished reputation! He was a polygamist too, don’t forget to mention that. Of course what he said was true and insightful regardless of his parentage. The truly funny part of this is that Grey Owl, who was arguably the most famous beaver advocate in history, and certainly the only one during the end of the fur trade, lived in Saskatchewan, which is now won of the MOST famous beaver-killing provinces in the world.
Here’s a video I made using his speech in the movie by Richard Attenborough. I’m actually quite proud of how the 90 seconds came together, even slipping a little Beethoven in the background.
But maybe you are more old school, and want to see the real thing (er reel thing). Here’s the original 1936 documentary produced with National Parks Canada. As beaver Champions go, he really set the standard. I am sorry every day my living room doesn’t have a beaver pond in it. I can’t speak for Jon, though.
Guess whose heroic work is keeping the Columbia Spotted frog off the endangered species list? This is the press release last week from Fish and Wildlife. I can’t wait until Obama presents beavers with the presidential medal of honor for their good fiscal work in saving our vulnerable species.
This is in part due to the great work by friend of this website, Dr. Robert Arkle, who’s paper was recently published in the Journal of Ecology and Evolution. Here’s my favorite part of the press release.
Beaver are also important for the creation of small pools with slow-moving water that function as habitat for frog reproduction as well as for creating wet meadows that provide foraging habitat and protective vegetation cover. Proactive Beaver management by the states involved will be important for the long-term survival of Columbia spotted frogs. Nevada, Oregon and Idaho all include the Columbia spotted frog on their list of protected species.
Did you get that? Stop killing beavers and the frogs have a chance. Consider this a federal memo.
Yesterday several Worth A Dam folk gathered to make sure the beavers still weren’t there, leading us to observe that the scraped area between the creek and the train station is full of water and beaver trails thru the grass. We will investigate further and keep you updated on the latest news about our MIA beavers.
I also had to have ONE LAST MOMENT of vacation before Monday rolled around. And here’s what I decided to play with. At the moment I’m crazy about the Beethoven in the background, and really appreciating my new toy. It’s only one minute long, I promise it won’t make you cry, so WATCH it and share with folks who need to see it.
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I had long been fascinated by Archibald Belaney, the Englishman who escaped in the early 1900s to Canada where he sought a simpler life by taking on the First Nations identity of Grey Owl. He later became a world-famous author and speaker, urging us in his books and speeches to take care of our fragile environment.
Grey Owl chose this spot in Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan in 1931 to be secluded, but accessible. Most who visit today will hike the 20-kilometre trail to get there and sleep overnight in a nearby campground. We weren’t quite so adventurous, opting instead to cover most of the distance by boat with a guide from the Waskesiu Marina Adventure Centre, only having to hike a 3-kilometre trail there and back from the shore of Kingsmere Lake.
While it saves time to take a boat, you should consider the extra work needed for the 800-metre portage along Kingsmere River before you get to the lake. Fortunately, there is a railway track with a push cart that lets you move your boat that distance, but if you get to one end of the portage and the cart isn’t there, it means hiking to the other end and bringing it back. Needless to say, we had to fetch the cart each time which added another 3.2 kilometres of walking.
The cabin is known as Beaver Lodge for a reason. It sits right at the water’s edge and is actually built on top of a beaver lodge because Grey Owl shared his cabin with Rawhide and Jelly Roll, a pair of orphaned beavers he adopted when they were kits.
The interior of the cabin has few artifacts from Grey Owl’s life. There is an old bed, a table with a guest book and some tobacco offerings. Nearby is a stack of commemorative postcards that can only be found here, intended as one-of-a-kind souvenirs for visitors to bring home.
A short distance up the hill from Beaver Lodge is another cabin that was built one year later for Grey Owl’s wife Anahareo and their daughter Shirley Dawn. It was built because they tired of the nocturnal coming-and-going of the beavers in their house. It was also a place where visitors could stay. Because of his fame, Grey Owl would host hundreds of visitors every year.
A short walk away from the cabins is Grey Owl’s grave and the graves of his wife and daughter. I paused for a few moments to pay my respects and left a pebble on his headstone to mark my visit.
The spirit of Grey Owl lives on today in the men and women eager to share the beauty and wonder of Prince Albert National Park.
I, for one, know quite a few people in whom the spirit of Grey Owl lives on. Don’t you?
One hundred and twenty five years ago, a great conservationist – and imposter – was born in East Sussex. Known as Grey Owl, he was one of Canada’s first conservationists and is said to have saved the Canadian beaver from extinction.
Two years later, after a long trapping season, he trapped a mother beaver and the kittens were left in the lodge to die but Anahareo convinced him to take the baby beavers home. The episode led him to stop trapping animals and begin his writing and conservation work, warning of the dangers of the logging and fur industries and how they threatened Canada’s native beavers with extinction.
There’s a nice new article from the BBC on Grey Owl which begins to have a sense of proportion about his relative accomplishments versus his completely unimportant ‘fraud’. Go read the whole thing and begin to appreciate what a remarkable man this was who understood so much of nature, ecology and beavers at a time when everyone else was thinking the ‘disposable forest box would never run out of tissues or trees’. Among my most treasured possessions is a book signed by Grey Owl. I came across his remarkable story when I found this picture when I was working on “The Sacred Center”. I was as intrigued as I could possibly be.
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For the record, I’ve yet to tempt a beaver into my canoe, although I haven’t given up hope. Here’s the best moment of the 1999 David Attenborough film on his life, who had attended one of his lectures as a boy.
Now for something to read on my Autumn Vacation at the coast where I had the strange fortune of seeing my very first beaver.
Human beings are shortsighted by nature. We experience our brief lives as vast expanses of time, even with a knowledge of history measured in billions of years. Our attention spans are in tatters because of smartphones and tidbit media, and it’s harder and harder to find sustained moments to just look at the world beyond our screens.
The shortsightedness, and the bee thing: Both figure into Vancouver writer J.B. MacKinnon’s new book, The Once and Future World. MacKinnon likes to keep nature close. With Alisa Smith, he co-wrote the bestselling 100-Mile Diet, which helped to launch the local eating movement. He also wrote the narrative for the NFB’s online wildlife surveillance documentary, Bear 71.
Here, he advocates for an even deeper connection to the land we live on, and a longer knowledge of what we take from it. The Once and Future World argues that, when it comes to natural ecosystems, we are continuously forgetting what the Earth really looks like, and as such have forgotten what it is capable of. It is one of those rare reading experiences that can change the way you see everything around you, recommended for anyone interested in anything that lives and breathes.
MacKinnon’s book has a place in a wider movement called “rewilding.” The term is a slippery fish. It can refer to a conservation approach that favours restoring large-scale wilderness areas and connecting them, to protect the habitats of so-called keystone species – animals, like elephants or beaver, which play a role in engineering their ecosystems. It can mean the reintroduction of native species to an area from which they have disappeared, such the return of grey wolves to Yellowstone National Park.
It’s curious to think of Martinez beaver rally as a peoples quest for wilderness in their own neighborhoods, and interesting to consider what might have awoken in me when I began watching our beaver family closer. The book will be released on September 24th and you can pre ordered your copy here. You can bet I will be quoting the best bits for your enjoyment.
