Virtually every regional government in North America has a beaver in its midst, using their big, fluffy fur for jobs and, frequently, for camouflage.
It’s been decades since Anna, an iconic Montreal beaver, even left her beaver pond in the Park-Les-plages-des-Coheniers.
For decades, volunteers stepped up to remove the non-native aquatic creatures from that small pond after they drown hundreds of native birds each year as they chase them away. But on a recent Friday, the placid pond had been drained.
“It was a terrible scene,” says Collette Smith, a resident of nearby Pierrefonds who watched in horror. “There was so much blood and bleating.”
It’s an eerily similar scene that’s played out in flooded urban areas from Seattle to British Columbia to the Sacramento Delta area of California, where Delta borealis muskrat have been wiped out by controlled spills of hydroelectric dams.
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