February, 1921 
FOREST AND STREAM 
57 
CONCERNING BEAVER AND NUTRIA 
ALTHOUGH THE RELATIVE VALUES OF THESE TWO KINDS OF FUR ARE 
FAR APART THEY ARE OFTEN HARD TO DISTINGUISH BY THE LAYMAN 
By AGNES LAUT 
B EAVER and nutria are no relation 
in the animal kingdom. Yet they 
are brothers in the fur world. 
The fur trader scouts the resemblance 
of the two furs; yet the average lay- 
man has to look twice to distinguish 
them, especially if both have seen a 
couple of season’s wear and are a little 
faded and a little matted. 
As bought new, they are easily dis- 
tinguished. Beaver is a deep, thick, 
heavy fur. Nutria is a thick fur but 
is neither deep nor heavy. Beaver has 
a silvery gray lustre. Nutria is a sepia 
brown and has very little lustre. Both 
furs have been plucked of coarse over- 
hair. Both have at first a tendency to 
curl or crisp; but beaver is always the 
silvery gray, nutria the sepia brown. 
Lastly and most important of all, 
beaver is never dyed. Therefore the 
skin below the pelage and down, is white ; 
and the down is bluish gray. Nutria is 
nearly always dyed. Therefore the 
skin below is golden, and the down fur 
below the pelage is sepia. 
Both furs have their uses ; beaver for 
cold weather, nutria for raw weather. 
Both furs mat in the damp and lose 
lustre. Beaver wears like buffalo hide. 
Nutria except as a trimming is not a 
durable fur; and the prices of these 
furs, whatever the whims of fashion, 
should never be nearer each other than 
one for the nutria and three for the 
beaver. Beaver is growing rare; nu- 
tria more plentiful. In fact, in fur 
trade parlance, nutria may be described 
as the poor younger brother of the rich 
stronger beaver. 
The beaver is a castor; the nutria, 
a poor little water rat of South Amer- 
ica, like our muskrat of the North. 
Beaver were formerly plentiful on 
every continent of the world. To-day, 
they are only park specimens in 
Europe; and the range of the beaver 
has decreased so 
in America, it is 
found only round 
the Great Lakes 
and Hudson Bay, 
in Labrador, in 
the hinterland of 
Northern Onta- 
rio, in Athabasca 
and British Co- 
lumbia. The year- 
ly catch used to 
be in the hundreds 
of thousands, 
when flotillas of 
Northern canoes 
came down the 
Ottawa in bri- 
gades and flooded 
Montreal and 
Quebec and all 
New France in 
coin of the realm 
—Beaver. To-day, 
the catch is given 
by Brass as 80,000 for America, 1,000 
for Asia, and a few park specimens for 
Europe. 
What especially stimulated beaver 
hunting was the fact that the beaver 
pelt could be used for fur, the waste fur 
rubbed on belly and sides could be used 
for felts and hats, the tail was as great 
a delicacy on the banquet board as 
“bear’s paws”, and the general flesh 
was preferred to game birds, and the 
castoreum sold for the perfume trade 
at $12 to $15 a pound. Presumably, the 
discard flesh could be fed to the dogs of 
the Northern dog trains; but every 
atom of beaver was minted into coin or 
profit. 
I N the old days the price of beaver ran 
from a few shillings to 32 shillings 
a pelt; but with 100,000 to 500,000 
beaver peltries a year coming out by 
way of the St. Lawrence and Hudson 
Bay, and with money of three times 
greater purchasing value a century and 
two centuries ago than it has to-day — 
that yearly crop of beaver pelts was a 
veritable gold mine to the Hudson’s 
Bay Company, who operated the fur 
realm of the Northern Sea, or to the 
French colonial governors, who oper- 
ated inland from the St. Lawrence 
North to Hudson Bay, West to the Mis- 
sissippi and Rockies. 
In 1907, the yearly catch was placed 
at about 80,000 skins. By 1912, it had 
decreased to about 17,000 skins. This 
decrease arose from several facts. Set- 
tlement had cut off the beaver’s wide 
range and a closed season in at least 
two Canadian provinces had stopped all 
hunting of beaver. Also the whim of 
fashion had shifted from beaver to 
mink and fox. Miraculously, thanks to 
game lovers and faithful game wardens, 
beaver came back. It is in a healthy, 
plentiful condition to-day; but that is 
no reason for relaxing game laws and 
permitting the cruel work of game hogs 
to slaughter out of season old and 
young, male and female. 
In the 1916 New York auction sales, 
beaver sold at $12.75. By 1920, the 
price was running $15 to $20 in the 
Montreal, New York and St. Louis sales 
— not so great an advance as in other 
furs; but beaver during the years of 
closed seasons went out of fashion; and 
it is to be hoped it will stay slightly out 
of fashion for the next ten years; till 
beaver are plentiful as in the opening 
of the 19th century. In the spring sales 
of 1920, 21,000 beaver were sold at St. 
Louis, 9,902 at New York, 14,000 in 
London, and such a very large number 
in Montreal that they really represent- 
ed more than one year’s crop. But 
practically the spring of 1920 saw al- 
most 80,000 beaver sold ; and the spring 
sale is only one of three sales a year. 
At the same auctions, the sales of 
nutria ran 150,000 for St. Louis, 58,000 
for New York, 20,500 for London. Nu- 
tria prices ran 50c. to $6.10, which is 
not far short of beaver values when you 
consider the relative size of the skins. 
In fact, on the base of size, nutria went 
higher than beaver; for the size of the 
nutria is 16 to 19 inches with a tail of 
about 12 inches; while the size of the 
beaver is 3 to 4 feet. The size is, of 
course, another way to differentiate 
the two skins. 
B EAVER cannot be farmed in a do- 
mesticated sense. It requires too 
large ranging ground. It must be 
conserved and protected by closed sea- 
sons in large, well stocked wild life 
parks, such as Algonquin Park, Ont. 
The beaver mates in its second year 
for life and in three months produces 
its young — 2 to 3 cubs. The food con- 
sists of all aquatic vegetables, the 
shoots of rasp- 
berries, the leaves 
of willows, as- 
pens, poplars. It 
must have an 
abundance of 
vegetable food. 
The engineer- 
ing feats of the 
beaver have been 
m a g n i f ie d in 
works of fiction 
almost laugha- 
bly, but in spite 
of errors as to 
facts, it would be 
hard to exag- 
gerate the bea- 
ver’s engineering 
ability. When he 
selects a habitat, 
he builds a dam. 
He does this so 
(continued on 
page 88) 
