Dave Sullivan
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 21/01) - While somehow managing to skirt the need for an environmental review, a large beaver built a dam on Niven Lake.

Jackie McIntyre, left, and Jo-Anna Cowen at a beaver dam built on Niven Lake, before it was removed. - Dave Sullivan/NNSL photos

Floodpants were ready to come into style, as rising waters in a couple places spilled onto a popular trail around the lake.

That was, until a city crew wrecked the dam Wednesday to let the water flow and lower the lake level. But it won't end there.

Public works supervisor Greg Kehoe suggested this week that further action will be needed, and can't rule out relocating the beaver, which nobody has yet named.

Territorial wildlife officers say relocation could spell death, because there may not be enough time before winter to store up enough wood in a new home. Beavers seem to prefer birch and willow.

Last week an area resident opened a hole in the dam, but the industrious critter repaired it. "They work fast," says Jackie McIntyre, who discovered the beaver's work project a couple weeks ago while walking her dog, Chucho.

It's right under a footbridge crossing the shallow lake's northeast outlet.

"On the weekend I noticed the dam was open, but a couple days later the water wasn't running anymore. The beavers had plugged it up," said McIntyre.

McIntyre and her friend, Jo-Anna Cowen, said the city should leave the animal alone. "They're just doing what they're supposed to do. We're the encroachers," McIntyre says.

A biologist for RWED, which has authority over beavers, said they'll be trapped and taken away only as a last resort. But, warned Dean Cluff, beavers have a deeply ingrained instinct of always repairing their handiwork after it's busted up.

One solution may be to trick the civil engineering geniuses. Cluff said when the beavers aren't looking, a siphon pipe could be inserted under the dam that would allow enough water to drain.

But if the beavers discover a pipe, they may plug it as they would any other leak, he said.

The city's Kehoe isn't confident that plan will work, but that's exactly what RWED biologist Albert Bourque and the city have decided to try.

"That's prime beaver habitat. If we move the guy out you can be sure another one will move in next summer," Bourque says.

In 1996 different beavers built two lodges in the shallow lake, but no dam. Cluff doesn't know why those ones decided a dam wasn't needed, while the latest homesteader does.

"I can't figure that out."

Naturalist Jamie Bastedo, who wrote a book about Niven Lake and its history as a sewage dump, says the 1996 beavers suddenly disappeared that summer, after residents of a new subdivision along the shore complained the hungry beasts were eating all the best trees.

"There's no doubt this is a thorny issue," Bastedo said. "We have to be able to co-exist. The value of having wildlife so close to town is immeasurable."

He said years of sewage buildup turned the lakebed into fertile peat.

Though the lake was declared safe back in 1984, the beaver's arrival is "an encouraging sign of the lake's rehabilitation," according to Bastedo.

Bourque is determined the beaver should be able to stay and integrate with Yellowknifers.

He said tree trunks are easily protected with chicken wire.