Have you ever wondered what it’s like to care for a baby beaver?
Nancy, a licensed wildlife rehabilitation specialist, explained in a YouTube video that unlike other wild animals where experts typically use a hands-off approach, beavers need all the attention they can get.
“Beavers stay with their family for two years, and in that two year time period their parents teach them everything,” she said.
So, in May, when Nancy learned she would need to rehab a 3-week-old beaver that had been abandoned on the side of the road, she quickly learned how intense the rehabilitation would be.
Rehabbing a beaver requires a two-year commitment.
Nancy had to teach the beaver, named Beave, absolutely everything. It was like she was his mother.
When he transitioned from being bottle-fed to solid foods, it didn’t occur to Nancy that she would literally have to show Beave how to eat.
“When I showed him and mimicked what to eat, he finally understood,” she said. “But even then he wouldn’t eat it by himself. I had to hand feed it to him.”
Nancy has since been caring for Beave and helping him learn the ropes of what it takes to be a beaver.
Throughout the process she’s recorded videos of him and uploaded them on TikTok where they’ve earned hundreds of thousands of views.
As Beave has grown, he has begun to start building dams around Nancy’s home, something she said she took into consideration before accepting him into her home.
“Beave is just starting to dam with household objects, but has not yet started outside or in water,” she told Bored Panda. “He dams pretty much every evening. When I clean it up, he just rebuilds!”
Beave takes just about any object and piles them one on top of the other in the middle of Nancy’s doorways.
While Beave still has about a year and a half left in his rehab program, he looks like he’s well on his way to learning how to survive in the wild.
“The most challenging part about rehabbing a beaver is trying to teach him to learn all the things his parents would teach him. He does chew everything in the house, but with each rehab, there are unique challenges.”
If you want to follow along with Beave’s adventures, you can check him out on TikTok.
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