Fish Creek Park volunteers ease beaver flooding with pipe solution that keeps dams intact

Volunteers with the Friends of Fish Creek Provincial Park Society installed a pipe through a beaver dam near Bebo Grove on Saturday in an effort to prevent the pond from backing up and flooding nearby pathways, using a coexistence method refined over a decade.

The team, led by Himanshu Sangale, cut a notch in the woody structure to fit a pipe that would better drain the pond toward Fish Creek downstream. The work is designed to lower water levels by 10 centimeters and prevent damage to the asphalt, while allowing the roughly five beavers at the site to continue making the pond their home and storing food for winter.

"It's a solution we've had from over a decade of coexistence," Sangale said. "The beavers are still permitted to make their dam and store their food there for the winter. We like to work with them."

The team also cages one end of the pipe to prevent the beavers from damming it or becoming trapped inside. On Sunday, the group, which includes volunteers from Youth Central, performed similar work in the park's east end near Sikome Lake in wetlands where beaver dams can hamper water outflow when the lake is drained next month. That drainage brings a large, sudden volume of water and sediment through the system, and adding pipes to the dams allows the water to flow more freely into the Bow River.

Without that assistance, "the draining can overload the wetland's capacity to distribute the water," Sangale explained. The team will also inspect existing pipes that extend about 10 metres in an area of the park where beaver presence is considerably greater than at Bebo Grove—the pathways around Sikome Lake are where most beaver sightings occur.

The work is funded by a $5,000 Ocean Wise Ocean Action Grant provided by Canada Service Corps.