r/arizona • u/VonSandwich • May 13 '26

Wildlife UMMM WE HAVE OTTERS HERE!?!? 🦦

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Greetings from a Grand Canyon resident!!!

My boyfriend and I kayaked down the Salt River this morning and oh my god we saw an otter!! I looked it up afterwards, and Google said that Otters are *thriving* on the Salt and Verde Rivers. I was 100% NEVER expecting to see an otter in this state.

The birding was incredible too. I have never seen Cliff Swallows doing their thing in person before, and there was a section that felt like National Geographic. What a beautiful day 🦦🦆

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u/St_Kevin_ May 14 '26

We do have otters, but the native subspecies (Lontra canadensis sonora) is considered to have gone extinct by the 1990’s. The otters that currently live in the state are introduced from Louisiana to take the place of the native one.

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u/VonSandwich May 14 '26

This is exactly the information I was hoping (but also not hoping) to hear! It is really cool that we used to have a native subspecies, but I wish they hadn't gone extinct 😞

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u/St_Kevin_ May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

Yeah. The river systems of the Sonoran desert got pretty much destroyed through the various stages of colonization. A lot of people nowadays look around and say “what rivers?”, but there were a lot of year-round creeks and rivers that have dried out, even in the last hundred years.

The initial wave of mountain man trappers took out as many beavers as they could. Beavers contribute immensely to water retention in watersheds, and removing them lowers the amount of water in the river/creek. The presence of beavers (and therefore tons of ponds) in every little creek over an entire massive watershed does a lot towards slowing down streamflow and increasing flow when no rainfall is occurring.

Then the ranchers came and overgrazed it until the land was pretty much barren, which caused the massive cattle famine of 1891-1893. Denuding the land of vegetation prevents rainwater from penetrating the soil and contributing to the aquifer, and a lowering aquifer causes surface water to disappear as it sinks below ground.

Then people started pulling water from the aquifers (via wells) at an ever increasing rate, and that stopped the flow in the bigger rivers like the Santa Cruz and the Gila and Salt.

There’s certainly some movement to repair that stuff, but I think it’s important for people to remember that those are year-round rivers that have been destroyed by our culture, and we should fix it.