A Singles Bar for Beavers

Orphan beaver kit in July  2016 (Courtesy Wet Mountain Wildlife).

Beavers normally live in family groups, "colonies that may contain 2 to 12 individuals. The colony is usually made up of the adult breeding pair, the kits of the year, and kits of the previous year or years" (Source here).

You can't just drop a strange beaver in and expect it to be accepted.

So how can orphaned beavers be returned to the wild?

This month the Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife returned this beaver and some others to a stream where no beavers currently live, but which is good potential habitat.

Supervised (not pursued!) by a game warden's dog, the beaver swims away (Colorado Parks and Wildlife).

It checks out its new habitat (Colorado Parks & Wildlife).

The reintroduced beavers are all unrelated, of course. They normally mate in mid-winter, with kits born in the spring. So what we have here is a sort of a singles bar for Castor canadensis, with the hope that at least one or two breeding pairs will be created.

It is hard to sex beavers by looking at them, incidentally. Their external genitalia look the same. Some people can tell male from female by sniffing.