Alberta has the bighorn sheep. Manitoba has the plains bison. Yukon has the raven. So what’s Ontario’s official animal?
We don’t have one — yet.
The loon is our official bird, but we can’t help but think that Ontario’s other furry and feathery (and slippery and leathery) denizens haven’t been given a chance to compete.
That’s why, over the next eight weeks, TVO.org will be giving 16 Ontario animals their turn in the spotlight. You’ll learn about how they live, what threats they’re facing, and how they reflect the province’s character. At the end of the series, you’ll get the chance to make your voice heard — and to vote for your favourite critter.
The winner may not end up on a flag or a coat of arms. But they’ll get a fancy title: Ontario’s unofficial official animal.
Adult size: Up to 1.3 metres long, tail included (North America’s largest rodent)
Adult weight: 16-35 kilograms
Longevity: Up to 12 years in the wild
Feeding and diet: Herbivores that eat tree bark and cambium, the tissue growing just under a tree’s bark
Predators: Wolves, wolverines, cougars, lynx, bears
Threats: Climate change, habitat loss
Habitat: Beavers live in forested areas where they can cut down trees for sustenance and building structures. They build dams (sometimes several metres high) to enlarge their underwater habitats and can build lodges (usually five metres in diameter and two metres high) to shelter in. Beavers also dig canals (1.5 metres wide and 1 metre deep) so they can swim farther into forested areas.
Range: Throughout Ontario, including urban centres. Beavers can live as far north as the treeline.
Conservation status in Ontario: Some estimate there were 400 million beavers in North America in the 1500s (conservative estimates are closer to 60 million). The population was hunted to near extinction by the 1850s, but the species has made a comeback, with 6 million to 12 million alive today. Beavers are threatened by climate change, habitat loss, and conflicts with humans.
(Michael Runtz)
One fall, naturalist Michael Runtz was trying to photograph beavers harvesting poplar trees. He followed a large beaver up a drag trail leading from the forest to the beaver pond, one foot on either side of the trail so as not to leave his scent. “I went up around a corner. And, lo and behold, there’s the beaver hauling a fairly big tree behind it. And it’s coming straight for me,” Runtz says.
He froze with his legs spread apart. The beaver approached and came right up to him. “As soon as he smelled me, he dropped the tree. And he stood on his hind legs, his head almost crotch height and not far away.”
The beaver started to growl. “That scared me more than any bear or wolf encounter I’ve had, knowing how powerful those jaw muscles are and how sharp those teeth are,” Runtz says. “I didn’t move. And this went on for what seemed like an eternity, [but was] probably about a minute or so.” The beaver then dropped to the ground and dragged the branch it was carrying between Runtz’s legs and back to the pond.
That’s one of Runtz’s more memorable experiences from 50 years of “beaver enjoyment,” as he puts it. According to the Carleton University instructor and author, the beaver pond “is the grandest stage — in my opinion — in the world.”
Profiles of Nature: The Beaver
The beaver has been considered a national symbol in Canada for over 300 years and gained official status as “a symbol of the sovereignty of Canada” in 1975. The beaver fur trade was the economic basis for European colonization, and the species was hunted to near extinction as settlers shipped 100,000 pelts to Europe annually. The rodent rallied and lives throughout the country now.
“You have this animal that has been brought to the brink of extinction all in the name of a hat and sometimes perfume from their castor glands. Yet they’ve made this remarkable comeback,” says Glynnis Hood, vice-dean and professor of sciences at the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus. “They might not be at the same population levels as pre-European contact in North America, but they have occupied almost every available habitat that’s left and are able to have very stable and successful populations. That’s almost unprecedented.”
Hood says the animals are “tenacious, hardworking and social, but aloof, because they work with a colony — but they often will be doing individual tasks that then help the colony as a whole.”
Wild fact: Beavers are the only animals other than humans that can change a habitat.
One of the most remarkable things about them is their ability to engineer landscapes, Runtz says. By building a dam and engineering ponds, the beaver creates habitats that support a “myriad of plants and animals in the pond itself but also in the surrounding areas.” And when they leave a habitat, he says, the land continues to be fertile and supports a whole different range of species.
Hood says one thing people might not realize about beavers is that “their ability to dig is just tremendous.” They create canals extending from their ponds and use them to swim into forested areas. These canals can be deeper and wider than a metre and extend over 200 metres into the landscape. “I call them boreal neurons because, when you map them, they actually look like nerve cells,” Hood says.
Runtz says another underappreciated trait is the beaver’s sense of smell, which can distinguish between types of food, or individual humans.
Michael Runtz (left) is an instructor at Carleton University (Britta Gerwin); Glynnis Hood is vice-dean and professor of sciences at the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus. (Courtesy of Glynnis Hood)
He also marvels at their ability to hold their breath for 15 minutes, their self-sharpening teeth that never stop growing, and their “Swiss army knife” tail, which, on a big beaver, can be about 30 centimetres long, up to 18 centimetres wide, and four centimetres thick. Beavers slap their tails to communicate and use them like tripods to stand up when cutting down a tree. By regulating blood flow through their tails, beavers can heat or cool themselves.
Hood has seen tail slaps soak researchers, and she’s also watched a baby beaver scare itself into hiding with a mighty slap.
What threatens beavers most today, Runtz and Hood say, are people. Habitat loss is a threat, as is human-beaver conflict, which can result in the animals being trapped and killed.
The impact of climate change on beavers is less clear, Hood says. She notes that beavers are moving into habitats farther north as climate change leads to “shrubification” — the growing of shrubs in northern climates they previously could not survive in. It’ll be interesting to see the result of this, she says, as beavers have never been known to inhabit the arctic climates some now call home.
How do beavers build dams?
Runtz says if more people could experience the grand stage of the beaver pond, we might learn to better coexist with them: “Too many people are depending on Netflix and things like that to escape the drudgery of everyday life. But if you go to a beaver pond and see what beavers have done and how they have created this incredible stage that supports many players, you get a whole different distraction.”
“Whether you know it or not, beavers have touched every aspect of every Ontarian’s life,” Hood says when asked why the beaver deserves to be the province’s official animal. “Every iconic feature in Ontario probably has been influenced by beavers in some way, shape, or form.”
This series is produced with the assistance of Ontario Nature.
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