Canadian Geographic: “…This spring marks 50 years since the beaver reached this exalted status [Beaver (Castor canadensis) as a symbol of the sovereignty of the Dominion of Canada]. Were O’Sullivan alive today, he’d surely be gratified by its persistent grip, literally and figuratively, on our collective soul and heart and emotions. Beaver imagery permeates every aspect of our culture: clothing, food, art, advertising, branding, entertainment. More than 1,000 places in Canada are named for the beaver. On the land, beavers continue to shape and reshape terrain, in ways that are both challenging and instructive. They may even have a role to play in helping the country move forward with some of the most important issues of the day: reconciliation, halting biodiversity loss and coping with a changing climate. Little wonder that in a poll done for Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017, the beaver was chosen as the “most Canadian” animal. Yet commemorating this milestone is also a tricky task. The 1975 act may have given the squat, brown, furry, flat-tailed, buck-toothed, dam-building rodent official national symbol status, but by then the beaver’s potency as a national icon was already deeply entrenched, some of it predating Canada’s creation by centuries. Parliament declaring it just made it official. Much of that earlier imagery was directly tied to Canada’s colonial history. Beavers were the prized commodity that drove the fur trade, propelling Europeans ever deeper into the interior to collect pelts to make fashionable men’s hats back across the Atlantic. The Hudson’s Bay Company’s coat of arms, presented in 1671, a year after the company’s founding, sports four beavers. Canada’s first postage stamp, issued in 1851, 16 years before Confederation, was the Three-Pence Beaver; it was based on a sketch of the beaver by Sandford Fleming (no small figure who also invented time zones and engineered some of Canada’s early railways)…”