The Beavers of Stanley Park

Rachel Poliquin

Beavers have moved into Beaver Lake in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. A single beaver arrived in 2008. No one knows where it came from. Stanley Park is at the end of a peninsula that protrudes into the Pacific Ocean like a stubby thumb. Hemmed by water on three sides and by Vancouver’s downtown core on the fourth, the park is not particularly accessible to a migrating beaver. Perhaps it swam Burrard Inlet, a 2-kilometre stretch of water separating Vancouver from the wilderness of the North Shore Mountains. Beavers usually avoid salt water, but the distance is not impossible to swim. Perhaps it crossed the Lions Gate Bridge at night. A second beaver arrived shortly thereafter. The sex of the beavers was unknown (male and female beavers are indistinguishable by sight) until, unexpectedly, five beavers were spotted on a summer evening in 2013.

5.1 A tree that has been wrapped with wire mesh to prevent further beaver damage. Photograph by Rachel Poliquin.

For most of the twentieth century, Beaver Lake had been devoid of beavers. In fact, around the time the lake acquired its name more than a century ago, its last beaver occupants were forcibly removed. But such irony is to be expected from any beaver tale. The long history of human–beaver relations has been plagued with inconsistencies and contradictions. The truth of the matter is that it is hard to see a beaver. Over the past century, the beavers of Stanley Park present the odd incongruity of being everywhere visible as traces, but nowhere to be seen in the flesh.

Beaver Improvements

Vancouver is not an old city. The British naval captain George Vancouver was among the first Europeans to explore the area in 1792, having sailed all the way around Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn. The first European to arrive overland came in 1808, and the first non-Native farm within what is now Vancouver was established in the early 1860s. A decade later in 1871, John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, wooed British Columbia to join Canada with the promise of bringing the railway all the way west to the Pacific Ocean. Vancouver was chosen as its terminus, and the first train arrived from Montreal in 1887. The population of Vancouver was at the time was only 5,000 people. Wilderness was everywhere. But yet, improbably, on 26 September 1888, city council designed a 1,000-acre park on the edge of Vancouver, making Stanley Park one of the oldest and most ostentatious urban parks in North America.

In his fascinating history, Inventing Stanley Park: An Environmental History, Sean Kheraj details the creation and ongoing management of the park’s natural aesthetic. As Kheraj explains, a park is a human idea imposed upon a demarcated section of nature, and as such is always shaped by human intention. Even a supposedly pristine “wilderness” like Stanley Park has been profoundly shaped, reshaped, and reimagined by cultural forces, which are forever in tension with the ever-changing ecosystem.

As Kheraj outlines, from the park’s earliest inception, the Park Board strove to create artfully shaped ecologies while simultaneously, and paradoxically, “masking evidence of human and non-human disturbances in order to produce a more naturalistic appearance.”1 Early improvements included building hardscapes such as paths and a seawall (to encourage strolling and forestall sea-wave erosion) as well as ecological interventions such as replacing western hemlock with Douglas fir (an outbreak of hemlock loopers had left many unsightly infected and dead trees) and forcibly modifying the park’s animal populations.

In 1888, the peninsula was home to a wide variety of animal occupants, including squirrels, raccoons, skunks, beavers, and numerous species of ducks and geese, as well as humans and their domestic livestock such as pigs, horses, and cattle. After the area was designated a park, the Park Board had very specific ideas as to the proper sort of animals that should inhabit the new urban wilderness. As Kheraj explains, the board encouraged “attractive species of gentle demeanour” to live within the park with the aim of entertaining visitors with “a sanitized and tamed wilderness.”2 Most birds and small animals were welcome to remain. Other animals were ousted or exterminated, while various exotic creatures were introduced either to roam freely about the park or within the confines of a zoo. At various times over the park’s history, beavers have belonged to all categories of the Park Board’s animal management.

5.2 Map of Stanley Park, 1911. Map Cabinet C, Drawer 5. Courtesy of the City of Vancouver Archives.

At first glance, beavers might seem to conform perfectly to the Park Board’s vision of a tamed wilderness. Beavers are gentle and retiring, unless provoked. They are among the most domesticated of creatures – they maintain a year-round abode, mate for life, and raise their kits well into adolescence. They are also large animals (beavers can easily weigh over 20 kilograms), which might suggest they offered abundant viewing opportunities, particularly as visitors always knew where to look – beavers never stray too far from the water’s safety.

But Stanley Park’s beavers did not cooperate with the Park Board’s mandate in the early twentieth century. Firstly, they did not offer themselves for easy viewing. Beavers are secretive, nocturnal, and aquatic; it takes a patient observer with a sharp eye at dusk to catch even a glimpse of a beaver silently gliding by. But worse still, the beavers had their own version of “improved” nature. The animal embodiment of industry, beavers work tirelessly (some might say unrelentingly) to transform their environment to suit their lifestyle. While all animals are constantly modifying their surroundings, few animals have the vision and perseverance to build a new ecosystem. In that, beavers and humans are in a class of their own. But their ecological visions are often at odds. While the Park Board strove to mask its ecological interventions within the park, Stanley Park’s beavers had no interest in such sleight of hand. Ironically, for an animal that is exceeding hard to see, beavers make their presence abundantly known.

Beavers are not simply builders. By felling trees, flooding an area and retaining stagnant water, they create wetland oases. And by changing the landscape’s ecology, beaver craftsmanship directly controls the availability of resources for other organisms. In fact, biologists call beavers a keystone species or ecological engineers for their critical role in creating and sustaining ecosystems.3

As long as beavers have trees and water, they can remodel any landscape to suit their tastes. If the water is too shallow for safety, they construct a dam and build themselves a lodge in the middle of the ever-rising lake. Flooding often kills surrounding trees, and the slow-moving water entices a host of marsh-loving species and creatures that live in rotten wood. Beaver wetlands are associated with a more diverse and abundant bird communities, and the silt accumulation at the bottom provides ideal spawning grounds for golden trout. Although beavers deter certain species, by creating niche habitats and attracting different species than previously inhabited the area, beavers and their wetlands increase the overall species diversity of the area. Each year, the average adult beaver cuts approximately one metric tonne of wood – about 215 trees – for food and building materials, which means beavers can quickly transform a fast-flowing river into a stagnant and stump-studded haven for waterfowl, water-loving amphibians, insects, and the animals that eat them.4

5.3 A beaver gnawing on a tree, ca. 1920. Photograph by H. R. Stenton. AM54-S4: Misc P56, City of Vancouver Archives.

In the early twentieth century, Stanley Park’s beavers inhabited a small lake in a relatively isolated portion of the park. An early contour map of the park from 1890 identified the lake simply as “Marshy Pond.” As the name suggests, the area had been thoroughly modified by beavers into the ideal castorine habitat. The water was stagnant, and the surrounding forest was filled with dead and fallen trees that had either died from insect infestation or been chewed by beavers.

The lake hardly conformed to the Park Board’s vision of crystal blue waters. Perhaps the stumps, broken branches, and marshy water echoed too closely that other uncontained and unrestrained wilderness pushing against the edges of young Vancouver. As it was the only body of water within the park’s perimeter, the board hoped to beautify the lake and make the area more accessible to visitors. In 1911 the water was encircled with an embankment and a path. The area came to be known as Beaver Lake. But the beavers would have to go.

5.4 A postcard from Beaver Lake. Classic Postcards, Rootsweb.

The Right Sort of Beaver

The Park Board minutes from 1911 do not directly express frustration with the beavers, but letters to and from Stanley Park’s Zoo hint at a fraught and mercurial relationship.

On 25 February 1911, the Superintendent of the Public Parks Board of Winnipeg wrote a letter to Stanley Park following up on an earlier verbal beaver offer made to the chairman of their board. “He tells me, that you gave him to understand you could give him a pair of beavers.” The wording of the letter suggests Stanley Park was very keen to rid itself of beavers. A few months later, the Park Board also offered a pair of beavers to the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland. And in September, Horne’s Zoological Arena, a wild animal importing outfit from Denver, Colorado, wrote asking for as many beavers as possible. “We have been advised,” the letter begins, “that you have a number of surplus beavers you wish to dispose of.”5

At the beginning of the twentieth century, both species of beaver were sadly diminished throughout their indigenous range. Eight isolated populations totalling a mere 1,200 animals were all that remained of the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber).6 North American beavers (Castor canadensis) fared only slightly better; beavers were threatened from coast to coast. For example, when the 45,000 square kilometres of Wood Buffalo National Park was established in northern Alberta in 1922, largely to protect the world’s largest herd of free-roaming wood bison, the area was barren of beavers.7 By the 1930s, beavers were all but extinct in Canada’s vast northern territories, which prompted the Hudson’s Bay Company, the largest fur trading monopoly the world has ever seen, to initiate conservation programs in hopes of rehabilitating the species and saving their trade.8 Grey Owl’s powerful advocacy for beavers also came in the 1930s. In other words, in 1911 a thriving population of beavers was a precious rarity.

And a lucrative one. A price list from Horne’s zoological catalogue included in City of Vancouver Archives among letters to and from the Stanley Park Zoo (which suggests the beavers for sale may have been trapped in Beaver Lake) offered beavers for $150 a pair. If cost reflected audience appeal, a $75 beaver was less in demand than an African lion ($450) or a male hyena ($180), but not far from the allure of a German wild boar, “male, very large,” offered for $90. Armadillos were listed at $6 each.

Although beavers were not officially appointed as Canada’s national animal until 1975, they have always been synonymous with the nation. Canada, after all, was built on the back of beaver, and the Hudson’s Bay Company was practically its first government. Beavers were the motivating cause for North America’s first white settler colonies, and the quest for a steady supply of beaver skins to make beaver felt hats was one of the main drivers of expansion toward the Pacific coast. But beaver obliteration and beaver appreciation have never been mutually exclusive activities. At precisely the moment beavers were being slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands, those same beavers ascended as the supreme animal model of hard work, integrity, and perseverance. The industrious beaver began to gnaw during the eighteenth century and has never stopped. Endowed with an ever-willing, ever-ready work ethic, beavers became synonymous with busy-ness. As the English novelist William Kingston put it in 1884, “the beaver has fitly been selected as the representative animal of Canada, on account of its industry, perseverance, and hardihood, and the resolute way in which it overcomes difficulty.”9

5.5 The Beaver Enclosure in the Stanley Park Zoo, ca. 1911. Photograph by Major James Skitt Matthews. AM54-S4, City of Vancouver Archives.

It was perhaps that nationalized symbol, the beaver of Canadian backwoods, industrious living, and tireless perseverance, that the foreign zoos wanted to display. And perhaps it was such international appreciation that changed the Park Board’s opinion of their beavers. Whereas in February, it had been trying to rid the park of beavers, by July a beaver display was suggested for the Stanley Park Zoo. In November, the board voted to build a beaver enclosure for the extravagant sum of $1,450.10 The beavers of Beaver Lake were live-trapped to be displayed in the zoo.

The plan solved two challenges with one enclosure: it corralled the beavers’ “messy” ecological behaviour and put the hard-to-see animals on conspicuous display, at least in theory. In practice, the idea was a failure.

The beaver display consisted of an artificial pond encircled with a wooden and wire fence. A photograph of the enclosure shows it to be wholly insufficient to the task of containing the animals. A beaver could easily chew through or burrow under the fence, and they did. The pond also had a spouting fountain in the middle “to irrigate the surface and prevent stagnation or vegetable growth,” which only further accentuates the ignorance – whether wilful or not – of beaver behaviour.11 Stagnant water and vegetable growth are precisely what makes a beaver happy, while the sound of water constantly running through the fountain would have driven the beavers wild with damming desire.12

The idea of relocating problematic beavers in order to curb their ability to transform their surroundings and better facilitate visitor encounters is a striking example of Stanley Park’s mandate to offer visitors pleasing encounters with a tidied and tamed wilderness. As Kheraj puts it, the Park Board believed that “human modifications of the animal composition of the park was a necessary improvement for the pleasure of tourists.” Inhibiting the beavers’ ability to make their own ecological modifications was believed to be crucial for visitors’ experience. Blue waters and living trees were vastly more charming than swamps and stumps.

However, the wild beavers of Beaver Lake were not quite eradicated. Perhaps some escaped the zoo enclosure back to the lake, or perhaps not all the beavers were captured in the first place. Unfortunately there is no record of their numbers, except what can be determined obliquely from letters to and from the zoo negotiating sales and animal exchanges. In 1912, for example, a local pheasant dealer wrote offering a male pheasant to breed with the park’s population in exchange for a pair of beavers. In December 1912, the Seattle Park Board exchanged an elk for a pair of kangaroos and a pair of beavers. And in 1913, the Vancouver Exhibition Association wrote an exasperated letter to Mr. Balmer, the Superintendent of Stanley Park Zoo, saying, “I have been trying to get you for some time, in reference to the beavers that you promised me.” “The Superintendent has requested me to state,” came the reply, “that he is endeavouring to obtain a pair of beavers from the lake. They are very difficult to catch, but as soon as they can be trapped Mr Balmer will communicate with you.”13

In 1916 Beaver Lake was dredged to remove the mud and debris and transform the marsh into a blue-watered lake. It would seem the beavers were finally eradicated. The Park Board had a long-term plan of establishing a fishery in Beaver Lake. After multiple attempts over several decades, the fishery was finally abandoned. But the beavers did not return.

Living with Beavers

The return of wild beavers to Stanley Park plays into a new paradigm of urban park management. In contrast to earlier interventionist strategies, contemporary policies encourage indigenous animals and foster their habitats as sanctuaries for wildlife observation.14 Encountering “wild” nature within urban parks – as long as the animals are not too wild – encourages proximity, and proximity – as long as it is not too close – has the potential to nurture awareness, appreciation, and respect.

Such encounters, although spontaneous and unpredictable, are nevertheless highly choreographed and ideologically laden, which is to say, the nature we see is the nature we are conditioned to see. As the editors of Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective aptly put it, “animals are never just there to be seen, felt, or known. History situates them. Culture appropriates them. Science defines them in one way, affection in another.” Then again, animals are forever more than the objects we choose to contemplate. Animals will always exceed human reckoning because they “realize a life that exceeds the small circle of our so-called humanity, a full and feral life irreducible to reason and its pale twin, propriety.”15

Propriety is a key word for urban animals. Scavengers, marauders, hunters, rummagers and opportunists, urban animals do not always play by the rules. Coyotes kill pets. Racoons break into garbage cans. Swallows, mice, and rats invade attics and tear into roves. But beavers go one step better by radically transforming the ecology of their surroundings. And in that fashion, beavers are challenging neighbours.

It is true enough to say that humans and beavers never really cohabitated until the mid-twentieth century, when beaver populations began to recover. Eurasian beaver populations were driven into extinction as medieval towns grew into cities, and in North America, white settlement followed the fur trade – trappers and traders had usually already depleted the beaver populations before homesteaders arrived. Since beavers were last abundant, modern cities have sprawled across the landscape. Roads, rail lines, highways, sewer systems, and housing developments criss-cross what was once prime beaver territory, which means humans and beavers are forced to cohabitate in ways that are not altogether agreeable for either species.

5.6 The beavers’ lodge is the mound on the left, covered with shrubberies. Photograph by Tobias Slezak.

Stanley Park would seem to be an ideal landscape for humans and beavers to share. But the same difficulties beavers presented to the park’s management in 1911 still plague twenty-first-century wardens. Beavers have not changed their ways, and while gnawed branches and stumps are no longer deemed unattractive or the wrong kind of nature, the beavers of Beaver Lake require daily management if humans and beavers are going to share the park peaceably.

The vast majority of visitors (myself included) arrive during the day, when the beavers are safely out of view in their lodge, and most of us will only know ever know beavers from the traces they leave from their nightly constructions. Ironically, the only readily visible beaver in the park is a stuffed beaver in the Stanley Park Nature House, an educational centre run by the park’s ecological society. But even that beaver is only visible on Saturday and Sunday between 10 a.m. and p.m., and is otherwise covered in a cloth to protect it from sun damage – although damage has already been done. The beaver’s fur has been sun-bleached from chestnut brown to a tawny gold.

5.7 The veiled beaver of Stanley Park’s Nature House. Photograph by Tobias Slezak.

So what precisely do visitors see at Beaver Lake? The evidence is easy to miss, unless one knows where to look. The beavers have built themselves a lodge in the lake quite close to the pathway. But the lodge is completely overgrown with shrubs and grasses and easily mistaken for a clump of reeds. A hundred yards or so away, around the curve of the pond, the beavers have severely gnawed several large trees. The trees have been wrapped with steel mesh by park wardens to prevent the beavers from felling them and causing soil erosion. As tree roots undergird the path, losing the trees could mean losing a section of the path.

The beavers have also cleared a large section of water lilies. For Stanley Park’s half-centennial celebration in 1936, water lilies were introduced to the lake. Over the years, the invasive plants have all but eliminated open water. The returning beavers have removed (and likely eaten) the plants to expedite the swim between their lodge and the culvert. And that lily-free swimming lane leads us to the most extraordinary and most oblique evidence of the Stanley Park’s beavers.

Every night the beavers dam up the culvert with branches and mud. As the culvert drains the lake’s overflow and prevents the surrounding path and forest from flooding, every morning park wardens unclog the culvert again. And so it has gone, night by morning, morning by night, since the beavers’ arrival in 2008. A fortress of branches and mud now stretches about 8 feet high and 40 feet along the trail to Beaver Lake. Yet there is no interpretative sign explaining the wall of branches. It is stands as a mute testament – overtly visible yet bizarrely easy to miss or mistake – to the efforts both beavers and humans will exert to realize their vision of a perfected nature.

5.8 Beaver Lake’s culvert, unplugged. Photograph by Tobias Slezak.

5.9 A wall build from branches and mud made from debris removed from the culvert. Photograph by Tobias Slezak.

The history of the beavers in Stanley Park is a story of shifting policies on the proper management of the park’s creaturely inhabitants. It is a story of how nature is always being “improved” upon, whether by humans or other animals. And most crucially it speaks to ever-changing interplay between nature and animal desire. The treatment of the park’s beavers over the past century highlights that the park’s primary purpose was and remains a place for human recreation. The beavers will be allowed to stay as long as wardens are willing to unclog the culvert, which means that Beaver Lake remains a profoundly humanized landscape. And whether the beavers have been trapped, sold, penned in, or accommodated, they have always offered a reflection of the nature humans most yearn to see, all the while barely being seen themselves.

Notes

1 Sean Kheraj, Inventing Stanley Park: An Environmental History (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 4, 6.

2 Kheraj, Inventing Stanley Park, 129.

3 See Justin P. Wright, Clive G. Jones, and Alexander S. Flecker, “An Ecosystem Engineer, the Beaver, Increases Species Richness at the Landscape,” Oecologia 132, no. 1 (2002): 96–101.

4 Robert J. Naiman, Jerry M. Melillo, and John E. Hobbie, “Ecosystem Alteration of Boreal Forest Streams by Beaver (Castor Canadensis), Ecology 67, no. 5 (1986): 1254–69.

5 City of Vancouver Archives (hereafter CVA), Park Board Correspondence, Stanley Park Zoo, 1911–1913, box 48-E-2, folder 4, p. 2.

6 D. J. Halley and Frank Rosell, “The Beaver’s Reconquest of Eurasia: Status, Population Development and Management of a Conservation Success,” Mammal Review 32, no. 3 (2002): 153–78.

7 Glynnis Hood, The Beaver Manifesto (Victoria, BC: Rocky Mountain Books, 2011), 58.

8 See Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 102–11.

9 William Kingston, The Western World: Picturesque Sketches of Nature (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1884), 123.

10 CVA, Park Board Minutes, box 48-A-2, folder 1.

11 CVA, Park Board Correspondence, Stanley Park Beaver Pond, box 48-C-5, folder 18.

12 In 1972, Stanley Park mounted another beaver display within the zoo. An artificial pond, named Beaver Pond in distinction from Beaver Lake, was dug in the park’s upper zoo. The bottom was lined with a heavy-gauge steel mesh in an effort to contain the ever-industrious occupants. It was only after the road alongside the pond collapsed under the weight of a park service truck that zoo staff discovered the beavers had chewed through the wire and burrowed beneath the road to cut down maple saplings across the road. Presumably the beavers then dragged the saplings back through the tunnel to their pond. The wire mesh was patched and the road repaired, but shortly thereafter the miniature train tracks running alongside the pond began to sag. Thwarted in one direction, beavers had dug a new tunnel. Finally the pond was temporarily drained and lined with concrete. See Richard M. Steele, The Stanley Park Explorers (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1985), 125–26.

13 CVA, Park Board Correspondence, Stanley Park Zoo, 1911–1913, box 48-E-2, folder 4.

14 Sean Kheraj, “Demonstration Wildlife: Negotiating the Animal Landscape of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, 1888–1996,” Environment and History 18, no. 4 (2012): 501.

15 Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Youngquist, Gorgeous Beasts: Animals in Historical Perspective (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 3, 1.