Leave it to Beaver

They nicknamed it Magoo because it seemed blind to their presence. Or maybe it was blinded by their spotlight. Or maybe it simply didn't care. A large brown mammal, it waddled ashore from the dark nighttime flow of the Las Vegas Wash, right up to the two-man camera crew. I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille. Then it turned, displayed its broad, flat, hairless tail, and slipped back into the water and away.

Steve Patchin was wielding the videocam and Patrick Gaffey the spotlight, but the beaver was the whole show. Beavers in Las Vegas Wash! Who would have figured? You know what's in Las Vegas Wash, don't you? Wastewater! There had been rumors and anecdotal evidence of beavers in the marshy area in the valley's southeast quadrant, but this was the real thing scurrying right at them.

"I kept saying, 'This is ridiculous,' " Patchin chuckles a few days later as he runs the tape on his home monitor. He captured about three eye-catching minutes of Magoo, mostly paddling around the wash or gnawing chunks of wood with its bright orange teeth.

Patchin, tall, ponytailed and enthusiastic behind his round glasses, is a local videographer under contract to Clark County. The wry Gaffey, slighter and grayer than Patchin, is an employee of the county's Parks and Rec department. They've been taping in the wash to put together promo spots for the county's pending Wetlands Park project. Their goal: to document the wash's surprising variety of animal life.

"That's a white-faced ibus," Gaffey shouts as a black bird appears on Patchin's monitor, its gracefully curving beak straight out of Egyptian hieroglyphics. "It just blew my mind when I saw it." Then again, he's a birder, just the sort to get jazzed by the sight of a --

"Is that a phainopepla?" he barks as another bird appears on the screen. "I didn't know we had a phainopepla!"

Oh, they do, all right, along with a great egret and a great blue heron (actually, a pretty good blue heron at best) and an American avocet and a black-necked stilt, a barn owl and a burrowing owl and sparrows to spare. "We have on tape 56 bird species, including a badly shot golden eagle," Gaffey says. They've also captured a night-loping coyote and are on the trail of the wily raccoon.

But they're most excited by the beaver, caught on tape last Thursday night. With its furry mug and orange smile, Magoo has the potential to become the cute mammalian face of wetlands preservation, the poster beaver for saving the erosion-ravaged habitat. "When people see the beaver on the screen," Gaffey says, "it will change their whole perception of nature in this valley."

The park may be home to umpteen birds -- more than 170 species at last count -- but they can fly, so it's only a mild surprise to find odd ducks here. But the wastewater beavers of Las Vegas Wash -- now, that's wild! Also, birds generally lack the crucial awww factor that cuddly, furry mammals can rally to an environmental cause. Never send a black-necked stilt to do a beaver's job.

"People will be kind of startled (by the beaver)," says biologist Larry Paulson. "A lot of people don't know there are beaver in the Colorado River system at all." Even those who have lived or worked in the vicinity of the wash are largely unaware of its beaverish activity. The 100 million gallons of treated wastewater released daily into the wash, as well as its miscellaneous chemical pollutants, renders the presence of beavers doubly surprising.

"They've been in the Las Vegas Wash for many, many years," Paulson continues. "But very few people have seen them. They tend to be secretive, so the probability of an encounter is not high."

That probability drops every day; every day erosion nibbles away more of the wash. Crucial vegetation is lost. Paulson says the situation is critical. "It's to the point where virtually the entire reach of the wash below the (Henderson wastewater-treatment facility) is eroded," he says. "We've lost 90 percent of the habitat that was there historically." The park -- the first erosion-control facilities are scheduled to be built this fall -- will help arrest the damage.

Patchin's footage, matched with Gaffey's scripts, will go into short commercials, videos for community presentations and longer TV shows.

In the three months Patchin and Gaffey have been on the project, they've made a dozen or so trips into the wash, always during the day. "I really thought we needed to go out at night, because no one does it," Gaffey says. "And the immediate return is this beaver, which no one's ever shot before."

On Thursday night, they were looking for beaver but would have settled for bullfrogs. "There was a bullfrog making these horrendous sounds, almost like a cow mooing," Patchin says. He wanted to get it on tape, but couldn't find it. They'd been out there for several hours with little worthy footage to show for it. "We were done," Patchin says. "We didn't get anything. We'd packed all the equipment away. Then Patrick yelled, 'There's a beaver!"'

Finally! Patchin had lain in wait for the beavers before. A few poplar trees, planted in the wash years ago by biologist Verne Bostick, had recently fallen victim to orange-toothed gnawing. "I sat out by the trees, hoping they'd show up. They never did. All I got was mosquito bites."

Patchin's tape first captures the beaver swimming in debris-mottled water, little bits of organic refuse clinging to its fur. Then it zooms in for a tight shot of Magoo chewing some tasty wood. Patchin was amazed by the footage he was getting. A beaver in Las Vegas Wash! This is ridiculous, he told himself.

More swimming, more paddling. "As far as we were concerned at this point, that was good enough. We had all we needed," Patchin says. Well, almost. Neither being a trained biologist, the filmmakers weren't entirely sure Magoo was a beaver and not, say, a muskrat; his distinctive tail had been hidden underwater.

This is ridiculous!

Then, suddenly, Magoo lumbered ashore, Gaffey aiming the light right at him. He's so close ... "Maybe six feet," Patchin says. "Oh, he was within five feet," Gaffey corrects. Close enough that Patchin was ready to step back.

This is ridiculous!

Abruptly, the beaver turned to leave, offering his tail to the camera as if to say, does this look like muskrat to you? "Seems like he's insulting us or something," Patchin laughs as the tape rolls. "'I'm not afraid of you!"'

It was, for them, a startling experience. A few days later, Gaffey is still thrilled: With man beating back nature at every turn, cutting it down, paving it over, driving it to extinction, here's a simple mammal living its simple mammal life in a place no one expects it to be, among man's neglect and chemically treated toilet flushings. "It cheered me up that something isn't getting worse," Gaffey says.

He and Patchin aim to keep it that way. "We're not telling people where we filmed this," Patchin says. "We're worried that someone will go out and kill it."

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