In northern Canada, even the beavers have Starlink now

Though you might have thought the muskrats would get there first, the NWT’s beavers seem to be early adopters of Starlink.

Drive a few kilometres outside Yellowknife, past the Dettah turn-off and up the Ingraham Trail into cabin country, and you’ll find a beaver lodge that has its own little Canadian flag – and a Starlink dish.

The flag next to the lodge has been a feature for a while, but the dish is new.

Perhaps the beavers have gnawed through one too many fibre-line cables in their time and learned a lesson about connectivity and redundancy. Perhaps they cleared enough nearby trees to give the dish an unbroken line of sight to the stars.

Or perhaps it’s Chad Anthony, a Yellowknifer for the past 15 years or so, who saw an opportunity to help the beavers make a statement.

“I do a lot of camping out at the Cameron River Ramparts area. Driving back and forth, I’ve seen the beaver house there with the flags – everybody keeps putting the flag on there,” Anthony told Cabin Radio on Thursday.

With a laugh, he said he had decided to “put a Starlink on there and outdo the competition.”

It’s not an actual dish. Anthony quickly made the replica out of scrap plywood in his workshop and painted it to resemble the real thing.

He installed it at the lodge a few weeks ago. So far, damload speeds are said to be impressive.

“Up here, Starlink has been getting pretty popular, right?” Anthony said.

“Everywhere you go, you see a Starlink dish sticking off a house or shed or something. Heck, I’ve even got Starlink out at the Cameron ramparts when I’m camping there. So I just figured it makes a good laugh.”