She’s knee-high, the size of a large house cat, and when she wants food she will look up at you with soft, beady eyes and pat your ankles with leathery hands and soft mmm-hmmm noises.
In a hold-out effort not to anthropomorphize her, this juvenile beaver has no official name.
But as she rehabs in the Alberta Institute for Wildlife Conservation near the hamlet of Madden, about 240 km south of Edmonton, this one little creature is breaking the usual cardinal rule about interacting with humans.
Dam rough start
The kit got a rough start in an Edmonton area pond. Small for her age, she seemed to have gastric issues severe enough to be repeatedly cast out of her dam family, said Scottie Potter, AIWC communications coordinator.
Weak, the mewling infant would die on her own.
“The people that found her saw the parents kicking her out,” Potter said.
Through Alberta’s wildlife rehab network, she found a ride to AIWC in the foothills outside Calgary.
Exception to the laws of animal rehab
When a bear cub whose mother has been killed is brought in, rehab staff take great care to make sure he has minimal human contact — and the people he sees haze the cub, acting “scary” enough to make him fearful of people — or at least finding them distasteful, all in the effort to avoid habituation.
But the laws of animal rehab are upside down in the beaver world because of the deep social needs of the beaver kit, Potter said.
“They’re different than any other thing we rehab. This is really unique. They create really, really strong family bonds, and they stay with their family for two years in the wild, until they decide that they want to leave.
“The important thing with beavers during rearing is the social aspect of having another animal to connect with — in that case, a caregiver.
“Any other species, this would be like a death sentence,” she said.
Then suddenly, almost overnight, in 2026, nature will flip a switch, and she’ll be a self-sufficient grown-up, disdainful, and utterly done with her caregivers.
She will be wild.
It will be time to do her own dam thing.
Raising a beaver girl
Although beaver kits swim right after birth, the care and feeding of the littlest AIWC patient was initially a 24-7 proposition for the first month, including hand-feedings by nippled syringe at four in the morning.
“And she’s pooping in your bathtub all day,” said operations manager Raelee Barth, the little beaver’s primary caregiver.
As with human babies, there was a lot of screaming at the start.
“But she’s so cute. What we’d always say when we’re having the tougher days is, how many people get to say they’ve done this? Pretty few,” Barth said.
“So it makes it very worth it, and it’s a pretty good feeling when she crawls into your lap and chooses you. It’s very, very rewarding.”
The beaver gal rapidly grew from 500 grams to five kilograms, eventually graduating to eating trees and pond plants for 80 per cent of her diet, and then fruits and vegetables, and about 10 per cent is a brown block of food called “rodent block.”
She loves woody raw sweet potatoes so much it can only be a rare dessert treat.
She’s been known to throw a hissy fit if she wants food and her person doesn’t deliver, “screaming” and hitting like a human two-year-old in a tantrum.
Profile of a beaver
The juvenile beaver seems to have overcome the digestive issues that had such a life-altering effect on her young life.
She has the requisite equipment — four orangey incisors with chisel strength that will keep growing her whole life, hand-like front paws ready to for the engineer part of beavering: patting mud and sticks into place, and webbed back feet for paddling from dam to shore.
She’s not fast or nimble on land, encumbered with flat back feet and the scaly tail that’s so useful in water for a rudder or for a warning in her semi-aquatic life.
Her eyes and nose are high on her wedge-shaped head, and a series valves, seals, and membranes protect from water entering her nose, ears, mouth, and eyes.
She naturally learned to slick up her fur with oil she produces, so it’s water repellent as she motors along at up to 5 km an hour.
She could reach up to 66 pounds, although some beavers hit almost twice that weight.
It’s nature rather than nurture for the little Castor canadensis, who without a mother’s mentoring instinctively knew exactly what to do with a bough.
A quick chomp-chomp and her sharp incisors make quick work of it for the herbivore. She then drags it to damming her lodge space, blocking it off, making it “safe” and, presumably, Tupperware-tight.
“It’s one of those behaviors we don’t have to teach a beaver,” Potter said.
Once valued for pelts, meat and the castoreum they use to mark their territories, beavers were hunted to the brink of extinction, but are now considered a species of “least concern” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.
Their natural industry has put Canada’s national animal on every nickel.
Home sweet lodge
Her fine-weather home is designed with aquatic mammals in mind, and includes a pool and floating “lodge” she can access right from the water. It’s surrounded by steel bars and mesh, not wood, lest the recovering engineer take to it with her teeth for lunch — or a premature getaway.
“With the cold weather, she’s been moved into an indoor enclosure that will be her main space during winter. She’s also been practising her caching skills, (storing branches in her makeshift lodges), as well as building dams around her pool,” Potter said.
From dim early prospects, her keepers hope she will be ready for the wild by 2026, to pair off with a life partner, and raise kits.
Since 1993, the Alberta Institute for Wildlife Conservation has been a champion for the rehabilitation of injured and orphaned wildlife. Accredited through the Alberta Veterinary Medical Association, AIWC serves the needs of Alberta’s diverse wildlife.