A short history of a Canadian icon

A couple of weeks ago, a Canadian icon appeared in our backyard. Stomping Tom Connors? Buffy Saint Marie? Anne Murray? Terry Fox?

None of the above.

It was a beaver, Castor canadensis, one of the official symbols of Canada.

This particular official symbol of Canada showed up where the brook runs behind the house and quickly began gnawing down all the young birch trees out back. It hauled its hefty bulk - beavers can weigh up to 32 kilos - up the hill and used its “exceptional teeth,” as Hinterland Who’s Who refers to them, to butcher a young stand of birch out back.

It was hard to get upset over the trees, although it boggled the mind how quickly one beaver could take them down. They are capable of chewing down 214 in an average year. I can believe it.

This particular beaver was hell-bent on chomping down our birch. At first, we speculated it might build a house. Further down the Grimm Marsh, which our brook flows into, a large dam already existed, so a beaver house rather than a dam seemed more likely.

But it quickly became apparent that the beaver was stripping the bark and leaving the denuded sticks behind.

Castor canadensis making its way back to the brook after stripping birch in our backyard.

At this point, it needed a name. Sorry, but around here, we name everything. I mean everything. Our loppers? Cindy. My axe? Axe L. Rose. The beaver? On second thought, we dubbed him Justin, but after discovering several YouTube videos of assorted Justin Beavers, we resorted back to our first choice of Levitt II as a name.

Think about it for a second….

I have to admit I admire Joseph Gordon-Levitt, not the least for his role in the film Premium Rush, and would like to believe he’d be honoured to know a beaver partially bears his name.

The beaver figured prominently in my childhood, most memorably from my elementary school class. We were frequently called upon to sing Land of the Silver Birch; we dutifully chanted the lyrics: “Land of the silver birch/home of the beaver.”

Canadian folk singer Bonnie Dobson wrote the song, which isn’t even referenced on her website. Her bio informs us that Dobson “started out performing traditional French-Canadian, American, English and some Slavic folk songs as a teen at school.”

By 1960 she had met the agent for the acclaimed blues act Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Paul Endicott. Endicott heard her sing and became her manager, booking her in for a summer as the opening act for Terry and McGhee. What followed was fame: a recording contract, four solo albums, and multiple North American tours.

Dobson wrote a song for the film, On the Beach, a production of Neville Shute’s book, a post-apocalyptic novel about life after a nuclear holocaust. The film starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astaire.

That song, Morning Dew, became Dobson’s most enduring hit. Artists doing covers of it included the Grateful Dead, Jeff Beck, Ralph McTell, Nazareth, Clannad, Long John Baldry, Devo, Duane & Greg Allman, Dave Edmunds, Mungo Jerry, Episode Six (the future members of Deep Purple), Lee Hazlewood, The National, and, by Robert Plant with whom Bonnie played and sang a live version at the 2013 Bert Jansch Tribute Concert.

And what of Land of the Silver Birch, that tribute to the tree, the beaver, the moose, and more? In 2019, the song threatened to become tangled up in a “defamation lawsuit brought by a school music teacher against her principal, vice-principal and school board,” the National Post reported. At the case’s heart was whether or not the song “was ‘racist and inappropriate,’ as the principal of Toronto’s High Park Alternative School declared in an alleged libel of her music teacher.”

The outcome of that case is uncertain - most likely, it was settled out of court - but the resulting brou ha ha may have caused Dobson to distance herself from one of her most famous compositions. Of course, as children, as we innocently sang the lyrics “High on a rocky ledge/I’ll build my wigwam,” the notion of cultural appropriation hadn’t even been articulated yet.

While beavers themselves may be apolitical, like people, and other animals, that hasn’t protected them from being caught up in the maelstrom in the times in which they lived.

More on that in the next edition of Tales From Beyond the Grid.