What to do if you see a beaver in your backyard

Dale Gienow with WILDNorth speaks about Canada's national animal and what to do if you spot a beaver in your backyard.

Beavers are the hard-working national animal of Canada, but you may not see them working hard in the backyards here in the Edmonton area. Dale Gienow with WILDNorth joins CTV Your Morning Edmonton’s Kent Morrison on what to do if you spot a beaver in your backyard.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Kent Morrison: People may not see them, but there seem to be quite a few beavers in the Edmonton region.

Dale Gienow: Yeah, there sure are. We don’t see them often because they’re most active during the night, but certainly we have a fair number of them through our North Saskatchewan River Valley system.

Kent: Is it mostly the river that brings them to this region or are there anywhere else that’s prominent with beavers?

Dale: Mostly, although some people that take their dogs to the dog park in Terwillegar, for example, will be familiar with beavers around that area. In the Whitemud Ravine area, there’s beavers. So there’s certainly no shortage of them here. We don’t see them often during the day, but the springtime is when you’re most likely to encounter one.

Kent: People do know about beaver activity, chewing through trees and things like that. Is there any advice out there for people who want to protect either their trees or protect themselves from flooding because of dams?

Dale: You can certainly protect your trees. They naturally take down trees. They do it for food, they do it for storing it for later, they do it for building their lodges and their dams. Wrapping those trees with wire is going to help protect them. You have to be dual choosy and you can use natural deterrence to get them to leave the area.

Likewise, those beavers that like to dam up places, there’s no other animal outside of a person that can change a landscape like a beaver, but there’s something called a Beaver Baffler. It’s a mechanism that costs about $60, a couple hours of labour. You can put it in a dam that moderates the water level and you could actually live with the beaver harmoniously, so you don’t have to trap mode any longer.

Kent: Do you often get beavers through WILDNorth for care?

Dale: We do, every year we get a couple. Sometimes we get little guys that are orphaned. We actually had one in care that we just released a few days ago. Sometimes with the dog parks, they might get grabbed by a dog or hit by cars. The two-year-olds in the spring are dispersing, so three generations living in a lodge.

When those new babies come along, they kick out the two-year-olds and they’re moving across the city. This is when we’re most likely to see them looking for more water, so they encounter cars sometimes and hide under our porches during the day while we’re awake than at night, they’re moving on.

Kent: Do you have any advice for people who do come across a beaver throughout the city?

Dale: I’d encourage you to enjoy them. They’re not aggressive. They’re like that saying, “busy as a beaver.” They’re very naturally doing their thing, trying to expand on their habitat so they can have a great place to live where they can build their lodges or their homes. Enjoy them. We have lots of them around. There’s a great reason they’re our national animal.

Kent: Why do you think beavers were chosen as the national animal for Canada?

Dale: I think it’s kind of two-fold. Way back when we were established in Canada, beaver pelts were actually used as currency. This is how numerous beavers were when others came over to this country. I think beavers are incredibly industrious. They’re just a hardy species, kind of like Canadians, living in our harsh environments. The Engineer Corps and the military use beavers as their symbol as well. They’re just really industrious, productive creatures like us Canadians.