Clean Rivers for Beavers

The weather on November 1st was spectacular – clear and bright enough that we spent the afternoon in our waders picking up debris from the Speed River.

A beaver lodge sits a short way upstream, and the shallows around us were scattered with sticks the beavers had chewed down to pale wood. The lodge is just above the stretch where our debris keeps turning up. With Halloween the night before, the river had already collected some of it: a purple candy wrapper and a crushed can of orange spray paint with liquid still inside, along with the usual plastic snagged on the bottom.

We also pulled out half of a foam toy plane. We’d found the other half earlier in the week, about a kilometre upstream, which makes for a generous crash radius.

Along the bank we picked up tarps, foam and a lawn chair. One tarp had weathered to the colour of the leaf litter and nearly disappeared into it, even though it sat right at the water’s edge, where thin plastic like that breaks down easily into microplastics.

The one thing we couldn’t remove was a large shopping cart embedded in a creek nearby. Getting it out will take heavier tooling. If you’d like to help us get carts, tires and other heavy debris out of the water, the Friends of the Speed River page is how that gear gets funded, and we’d like to get this cart out before the beavers build it into something.

Here’s a 45 second clip of our cleanup: