Ghosts and Geese of Beaverhill Lake

by Nick Carter for Poplar Magazine.

Is there a place in your life that you can’t get back to, no matter how much you want to? Not physically so much as mentally. A place that might have felt important a long time ago, but when you go back now it’s just not the same. I figure the older we get, the more places like that we acquire. I already have a few myself. One of them I feel like I never actually saw in its full glory, and that’s Beaverhill Lake.

About an hour’s drive east of Edmonton and just past the little town of Tofield, Beaverhill Lake is a big, shallow prairie slough. Surrounded by popular woods and farmland, it has no lakeside resort towns or beaches. This, and the fact that it’s conveniently along some major migration routes, makes the Lake and its surrounding countryside an absolute haven for all sorts of birds and birdwatchers. Perhaps most notable are the tens of thousands of migrating Snow Geese that stop at the lake for a few days every spring and autumn, and it’s one of nature’s biggest thrills to see a flock of these birds rising from the fields and stream through the sky like a noisy white cloud.

I’ve been to the Lake several times and, like most local birders, knew it was important. My own outings to the Lake included solo birding trips, watching owl banding at the bird observatory, and participating as a guide and speaker in the Tofield Snow Goose Festival. It was there this past April that I got my hands on an old book called The Birds and Birders of Beaverhills Lake. Sneakily bid on for me at the festival’s silent auction by my mother-in-law, the book was written by Robert Lister and published in 1979 (at some point in history the ‘s’ was dropped from “Beaverhills”). Lister was a zoology technician at the University of Alberta in addition to being an expert birdwatcher in his own right.

Starting in the 1920’s Lister frequently accompanied Professor William Rowan, the University’s first zoologist, to the Lake to study and collect specimens of the local avifauna. The south shore of the lake was often the base of operations for these trips, particularly at a farming property owned by the Francis family. For the past several decades now a wooden birding blind has sat at a lookout spot on what used to be near the south shore called Francis Point.

It’s from Rowan’s field notes that much of the content for the book is taken, with commentary and supporting anecdotes from Lister to fill in the gaps. Some of the stories within are amusing, like the gull-banding operation in the reeking summer lake shallows. Many are laughable, such as Rowan’s driving habits on his field trips to the Lake (getting the old Ford stuck in the mud time and time again, running over his own shotgun, driving on the wrong side of the road, and flipping the car on a few occasions), or the many bungled attempts to catch crows in makeshift traps for Rowan’s migration research. There was also time the field camp got hit with a double-whammy of rotten eggs and skunk spray.

Other stories are less funny to the sensibilities of modern readers. While some species have increased nicely since the early to mid 20th century when Rowan and Lister went on their collecting trips, many resident and migrant bird populations of the Canadian prairies are now shadows of their former selves. Reading century-old accounts about flocks of shorebirds so vast they nearly blot out the sun, or the past abundance of species like the greater prairie chicken that are now completely gone from Alberta can make you resent the era you were born into. It’s worth noting that the collecting trips of early Albertan ornithologists made no long-term dent in bird populations (plenty of other factors to blame for that) but still, this was an era when most birdwatching happened down the barrel of a gun.

Rowan died in 1957, and the following year Salt and Wilk’s “The Birds of Alberta” was published. Around this time binoculars and spotting scopes became preferred, and the final third or so of Lister’s book documents the Edmonton Bird Club’s excursions to Lake. In the following years the bird blind at Francis Point was built, and the Beaverhill Bird Observatory was founded in the protected natural area located on the Lake’s southeast shore. The section of the road running between there and Tofield is nicknamed “Rowans Road”, and the nearby slough is now Lister Lake. Lister passed away in 1988 after having influenced new generations of naturalists who, over the decades, visited the Lake regularly. Many of these folks today represent what’s now the ‘old guard’ of birdwatching in Alberta.

I’m glad to say the bird observatory is as strong as ever. Has the Lake itself seen better days? Sometimes it feels like it. Water levels there have always fluctuated, sometimes dramatically, but overall the Lake has shrunk and increasingly dry conditions have made this worse. Not too long ago, it dried up completely for a while. The Francis Point bird blind, now weather-beaten, cobwebbed, and vandalised looks out over a long swath of grass with the water just visible, glimmering in the distance. But the Lake remembers the ghosts of birds and birders now gone from its shores.

The shrinking of Beaverhill Lake and of bird populations that were both at their peak before I was born creates a strange kind of yearning. Can you be nostalgic for a time you never knew? Was it always so great in the first place? Society has moved in some better directions since then, despite losing places and species along the way. But birds and birders are still drawn to the Lake as ever. The past is easy to get drawn into, but you can’t live there forever. The future of Beaverhill Lake is what’s really important.

Here’s hoping that in another century the Lake will still be a birdwatcher’s paradise. Maybe those who help preserve it now will still be remembered by then. It would be a good afterlife, in my opinion, to be one of the ghosts of Beaverhill Lake.