Autumn is the busiest time of the year for beavers – dams must be built in order to ensure they can survive the harsh winter months.

This article caught my attention. Mostly because it hovers between adopting a tone where beaver behavior is good for conservation and still manages to describe them as ‘nuisances.’

When will they ever learn?

In the Las Vegas desert, beavers turn a drainage channel into habitat

At Wetlands Park on the eastern edge of Las Vegas, environmental specialist Ben Jurand points out what look like minor disturbances — but they are anything but.

Heaps of felled cattails, sturdy mesh wrapped around the bases of cottonwood and willow trees, holes leading into underground tunnel systems and, atop the beam-like concrete weirs that slow the streams’ flow, low mounds of muddy sticks and reeds all hint at the busy beavers reshaping the man-made wetlands.

Beavers? In Las Vegas?

“When you think about the traditional place that you associate with beavers, it is going to be those more northern climes, fir trees and quaking aspen stands, mountain creeks and meadows,” says Doug Nielsen, a spokesperson for the Nevada Department of Wildlife. “So, for some people, when they find out that they’re here, it is a surprising moment. The thing that’s amazing about them as a species is how adaptable they are.”

Gosh seeing that woven dam made me homesick for our own beaver that used to build his dams only out of similar materials. Do you remember him? I used to call him ‘Reed’.

Wildlife experts agree that beavers are uncommon and unexpected in Southern Nevada.

But wherever streams burble and woody trees grow, beavers can establish a home — and while much of the Las Vegas area seems inhospitable to a semiaquatic animal, the Las Vegas Wash provides the basis of a habitat for a critter that may be better known as an official national animal of Canada than an inhabitant of the Mojave Desert.

The farther north in Nevada you go, Nielsen said, the more likely you are to spot beavers, though they are also native to the general Colorado River watershed. Beavers can enhance conservation efforts along streams and riverbeds because their dams back up water that creates habitat for multiple species. They are more of a novelty here, he said.

No. They may be less visible because of your poor water conditions but they are still doing conservation efforts and allowing many more of them would HELP your unwatered region.

Their instincts, however, are strong. And sharp-eyed visitors to the local wetlands can spot one if they’re lucky.

Jurand said the beavers followed the river’s offshoots to the park, which opened in the 1990s, and found everything they needed.

Ironically, he said, beavers are known as natural engineers. But it was human engineers who created and maintained the park’s wetlands for specific reasons: to manage the urban runoff and treat wastewater that flowed heavier through the Las Vegas Wash as the metro area grew. So, it’s the human engineers who override the beavers’ determined work.

I’m starting to see the problem.

Staff at the park, which is owned and operated by Clark County, routinely clear away beavers’ attempts at damming and lodge-building. They also remove the floating shelters the animals use. It’s all part of keeping water flowing toward Lake Mead as intended. (Here, the beavers live in bank shelters rather than traditional lodges.)

Floating shelters? Floating shelters? What the hell is a floating shelter? I can’t think of a single thing beavers build that floats. OR is supposed to float. That would kind of defeat the point.

Maybe this is a floating shelter? Why wouldn’t you call that a lodge then? Couldn’t they live in both places? Some beavers in the bank and some in these huts?

Staff also protect the trees that serve as habitat for the birds and other species that live in the park, since beavers normally would make quick work of them, and fill in some holes to keep trails safe.

Beavers do much of their work overnight, so largely outside the park’s hours, but visitors may spot one at dusk or dawn.

Nevada Department of Wildlife biodiversity supervisor Matthew Flores said that while beavers are native to Southern Nevada they historically have not been directly on the Colorado River; too much water flowed too fast before the Hoover Dam altered the pace. They stick to backwaters, building dams as they are hardwired to do even with human intervention, he said.

“The beavers are just going to do beaver things, like eat aquatic vegetation, build lodges and kind of muck things up in terms of what we’re doing,” Flores said. “They don’t like a static system. They like to build stuff.”

They also like to SAVE WATER. You would think Las Vegas would find that kind of desirable.

Neither the county nor the state track beaver population figures. Nobody knows how many live in Wetlands Park.

“They just are,” Nielsen said. “They do their thing.”

Gee do you think he’s seen this documentary?