Road Trip - Mistagance

When we arrived at Mistagance Campground last night, we had driven past a crazy looking tented meeting house. Once we were set up, we walked back down the road to find it, and see if there was a schedule of events or presentations. It turns out we’ve missed the main summer season by a few days, which for the most part is good because there are less crowds everywhere, but also means that all the park facilities are now running at reduced service.

The only event running while we’re staying here is called “150 Feet from the Beavers”, starting at 10am today on the other side of the park. It’s about an hour drive from here to Mekinac where the presentation started, and we still had to call past the park entrance to register ourselves, so we had to get up early!

We were the only English speakers on the tour, so one of the park rangers split off to give us a private presentation that we could understand. Not being able to speak French wasn’t a limitation that we’d considered until arriving here, but it was becoming obvious that we were in a minority. We asked the ranger where most people in the park came from, and she said mainly Quebec, and increasingly Europe, especially France. A few people make their way over from Ontario, but apparently none of them were there today.

The ranger taught us a lot about beavers, which are very interesting creatures! They are the logo for Parks Canada, as they were the reason for the “discovery” of most of Canada (“discovery” in quotes because of course the land was already known to the indigenous people who lived here, and they’re talking about European discovery). Europeans came to Canada to hunt beavers for their pelts, which they used to turn into felt hats. They had already over-hunted the beavers back in Europe, so needed a new supply. As they progressively destroyed local populations of beavers they moved further and further across Canada, mapping and settling more and more of it as they went. The fur traders also discovered that the act of wearing the pelts caused the fur to become felted by itself, so they started trading with the indigenous people for what were effectively their old clothes!

Beavers live in structures called lodges, which are made of a large pile of sticks and mud that has been hollowed out inside. They start by building a solid pile, and once it’s large enough they dig into it from the outside. To protect their lodge from predators, they make the entrance tunnel start up to 3 metres underwater. This deters most predators except for otters, who are more than happy to swim up the tunnel and eat all the beaver babies!

To create the environment required for such a lodge with an underwater entrance, beavers dam lakes and rivers flooding the area and raising the water level. Not only does this give them a deep pool to build their houses in, it also makes it much easier for them to move around as they are heavily adapted to swimming. The water also makes it a lot easier for them to move more logs into position to shore up the dam and expand their lodge, because they can just float them instead of needing to drag them.

Another reason for building the entrance tunnel so deep is that water at that level will most likely not freeze even in the dead of winter, which ensures the beavers a safe entry and exit path. To take further advantage of this, beavers start building small ‘fridges’ of their favourite edible trees and sinking them just outside the entrance tunnels. This allows them to swim down the tunnel, grab some more food, and then go back inside without ever being visible to wolves, their main predator. Park rangers conduct aerial surveys of these fridges to use as an indicator of which lodges are in use, and how many beavers might be living in the park.

The track that we walked took us past several different dams, which progressively increased the water level and the spread of the new lake. The ranger told us that after Humans, beavers were probably the next species on the list of animals who massively alter their environment to suit their ideal living conditions. She pointed out a beaver lodge, but it had become overgrown with grass and weeds over the summer months which indicated that the beavers had probably moved elsewhere. The food supply of birch, poplar, and other soft-barked trees in the area was still plentiful, so the ranger surmised that the beavers would no doubt have moved somewhere local, and they just hadn’t spotted the new lodge yet.

There was lots of evidence all around of beavers cutting down trees. They use their gigantic front teeth to gnaw big chunks of wood from the trees until they fall down, leaving iconic pointed stumps behind. We learned that these specialised teeth are constantly growing and consist of a very hard layer at the front with a softer layer behind which means that as wear they keep a sharp edge. Beavers don’t eat the wood of the trees that the fell, they just like the bark on the outside. Apparently, they chop up small pieces of tree limb and eat them like corn on the cob!

It’s incredible how well adapted beavers are to this environment that they create, for example, a special claw on the back foot which is shaped like a fork, which they use to comb oil from glands on their rumps through their fur to keep it waterproof. They can close off all external entrances to their bodies and hold their breath for up to 15 minutes underwater when necessary. I’m sure that helps with subaquatic engineering!

After the talk we drove to a nearby town called Shawinigan to grab a quick bite at A&W and post the last two day’s blogs. There’s no cell coverage at our campsite, so I’ve just been writing them up in Word on my laptop while we sit around the campfire (as I’m doing now). This town was an interesting experience, as pretty much nobody involved in our interactions at A&W or the grocery store spoke any English! We got by with some smiling and gestures but felt bad for not having picked up any French other than “bonjour” and “merci”.

We’re now back at the campground and have just finished some curry and flame-grilled naan for dinner. The last two places that we’ve stayed at just had a ring of rocks as a fire pit, but this one has a custom-built metal ring with a grill that you can swing out over the hot coals, so we decided we needed to make the most of it! We’ve also just tried s’mores for the first time, which we made by melting a marshmallow and shmushing it between two chocolate-topped biscuits. I’m not sure that this is a strictly traditional way of making s’mores, and there’s definitely room for improvement with our technique, but we now understand the hype!