Saying beavers are crafty rodents is an understatement.
These plucky little builders are key in managing the Alberta ecosystem. Beaver ponds help prevent soil from washing away, and their wetlands provide food, shelter, and resting places for other animals.
Beaver dams help stabilize the unpredictability of drought and flood conditions, making Canada’s most industrious creature critical to watershed resiliency.
And, did you know, the world’s largest beaver damn is located in Alberta?
Dam!
In Wood Buffalo National Park lies a massive beaver dam, measuring a gigantic 70,000 square meters. That’s big enough to be seen from space!
For comparison, the front of the dam is the length of seven football fields, and the entirety of the dam holds approximately 92,000 dump trucks of water. Not too bad for an animal that doesn’t get much bigger than 60 pounds.
The first on-record discovery of this dam occurred in 2007, when a landscape ecologist was examining satellite images from the 70s. Among the hundreds of beaver dams known to the area, this particular one was visible in the images. Parks Canada was notified, and in 2009 staff flew to the site by helicopter to take pictures of the area.
An impossible journey
The keyword here is helicopter. Located at least 22 kilometres south of Claire Lake, the dam cannot be accessed by land or water. You can thank the pathless swampy terrain for that.
Only one person has ever reached the dam on foot, confirming the extreme difficulty of navigating the tar-like swamp, and describing the mosquitoes as “relentless” and among the worst he’s ever seen.
However, like many natural wonders, the dam is best left undisturbed. Wood Buffalo Park is considered to have “a high level of integrity” due to its size, remoteness, and absence of resource extraction and human-related stress. It’s among the largest undisturbed grass and sedge meadows left in North America, and home to the world’s largest remaining herd of wood bison.
Simply put, some things are best left appreciated from afar.
Where: See location here
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