‘It jumped into his arms’: Low water on Cowichan River leads to beaver rescue

When 16-year-old Connor Belanger was tubing down the Cowichan River and heard squeaking coming from a fluffy bundle struggling in the rapids, he and his family didn’t know what it was, until it started scrambling to get onto his tube.

“It jumped into his arms, did you see that,” Connor’s mother Liz Belanger can be heard saying in cell phone video she recorded in the early August rescue.

“He noticed this little beaver kit really struggling in the rapids and he reached out his arm and it clambered right on, and he cuddled it.”

Once out of the river, the Victoria family quickly rushed it to the North Island Wildlife Recovery Centre in Errington. Where staff estimated the baby beaver to be just one week old, when it should have been in a dam with its mother.

Instead it was skinny, struggli