It was almost closing time Sunday. One of Mathew O'Hara's staff members had stepped out for a breath of fresh air during a break when he noticed a strange animal making its way through the parking lot at Beertown, a restaurant bar in uptown Waterloo, Ont.

At first, he thought it was a skunk, and ducked back inside for backup.

"[He was walking] through the parking lot, in between the vehicles," explained beverage manager O'Hara. "By the time we got out the back door again, the beaver was right up ... maybe 10 to 15 feet from our back door."

Being a beaver, plus not having valid age-of-majority ID, it was denied entry to the establishment.

Wandered away from park

"It was a good sized beaver. Its paws were probably the size of my palm. I have medium-sized hands, I guess. It had big, big webbed feet and the big flappy tail too," described O'Hara.

"If you put two basketballs side by side, it's about that big. If I'm guessing how heavy it was, I would say 30 to 45 pounds."

When you get a beaver at a bar, that's something special. - Mathew O'Hara, beverage manager, Beertown

The beaver, they learned, had wandered away from Waterloo Park not far from the city core, and a marshy area it calls home.

"So Adam, the other manager here grabbed a cardboard box and kind of snuck up on it and slipped that over top to kind of contain it a little bit so we could get Grand River Conservation [Authority] over. But it was moving around with the box on top of it. So we got a bigger garbage bin that we flipped over and put it on top — a big plastic bin, so it wasn't confined either."

Caging beaver took 7 people

Next began the process of containing it — no easy task. It took seven people, including two Region of Waterloo police officers, to get the wandering beaver into a cage and into a transport van, said O'Hara.

It created quite the spectacle, said O'Hara, but despite all the commotion the beaver — who staff nicknamed Paul, for Paul Bunyan the American folk tale lumberjack — remained calm. "It was fairly docile actually, it was kind of just sitting there, looking around."

The beaver was brought back to Waterloo Park and released near its home, where it's hoped he'll stay for the rest of patio season.

"Honestly I'm just glad we were able to take care of it and get it back to safety, without it causing somebody else harm or getting hurt itself, right?" he said. "When you get a beaver at a bar, that's something special."