When 16-year-old Connor Belanger was tubing down the Cowichan River and heard squeaking coming from a fluffy bundle struggling in the rapids, he and his family didn’t know what it was, until it started scrambling to get onto his tube.
“It jumped into his arms, did you see that,” Connor’s mother Liz Belanger can be heard saying in cell phone video she recorded in the early August rescue.
“He noticed this little beaver kit really struggling in the rapids and he reached out his arm and it clambered right on, and he cuddled it.”
Once out of the river, the Victoria family quickly rushed it to the North Island Wildlife Recovery Centre in Errington. Where staff estimated the baby beaver to be just one week old, when it should have been in a dam with its mother.
Instead it was skinny, struggling in the rapids and likely never would have made it, according to North Island Wildlife Recovery animal care worker, Tessa Jackson.
“What we think could have happened is the water levels rose and dropped, then swept the baby away from its nest,” said Joanna Smith, manager of animal care at North Island Wildlife Recovery.
Drought conditions have dropped water levels on the Cowichan River to emergency lows this summer. Essentially exposing the baby gates or exits to the dam, said Smith, and possibly flushed out the little female that shouldn’t have been outside it.
READ: ‘Severe’ drought and hot conditions lower Cowichan-area rivers
But two weeks in, she’s on the road to recovery. Eating and even getting tub time in, to test her webbed feet and swimmers tail.
“You really don’t know how cute they are, until you see them in person. They sound like human babies, and they even smell like a human baby,” said Smith.
The tiny beaver that has since been named Timber. Once old enough, likely about a year from now, North Island Wildlife Recovery workers will release her back to the wild at the same spot on the Cowichan where she was rescued.