A family of beavers who have become a signature part of the fairway experience at Meadow Lakes Golf Course are headed for extinction, with the Yukon government looking down the barrel.

The Department of Highways and Public Works has received a permit from Environment Yukon to fatally shoot or snare the beavers.

The reason: they are building dams that threaten to block a culvert near the course.

“They’ve recently crossed the road and begun building smaller dams under one of our culverts that runs under the Alaska Highway,” said Doris Wurfbaum, a Highways and Public Works spokesperson.

The department can now hire a licensed trapper “to humanely trap and what they call ‘dispatch’ the beavers,” she said. “And the term dispatch means destroy.”

If the culvert became fully blocked, the section of highway above it could get washed out, Wurfbaum said.

“Our number one priority and responsibility is to make sure that our infrastructure is safe for the public ... it’s nothing that we’d like to do or want to do.”

Consisting of at least four members — a sizable mom and dad as well as two smaller offspring — the beaver family has made the golf course its home for the past two winters.

They boast a prominent lodge on the pond nestled between the sixth and seventh holes.

The industrious rodents — part of a longstanding lineage as a Canadian national symbol — can often be seen, especially in the fall, transporting branches across the links, braving the golf balls that slice and hook through their backyard.

They’ve even made the final hole simpler for local golfers, gnawing a dogleg left into a more gradual curve by chopping down many of the trees that act as obstacles to a direct line from fairway to green.

“That hole is aptly known in our group as the Kracken, because it continually kicks our ass,” said local golfer Josh Wiebe, referring to a mythic Nordic sea monster and/or black spiced rum.

“So having the beavers there clearing the corner is helpful to our game.”

Jeff Luehmann, who owns Meadow Lakes, has come to appreciate the semi-aquatic creatures that roam his turf, and frowns at their impending “dispatch.”

“Without a doubt, it would be a terrible loss, not just for me but for the public,” he told the Star Monday.

“We’ve had a lot of calls: ‘What’s going on with the beavers?’”

He said the beavers have helped inadvertently with course maintenance as well as the bottom line, bringing in families with young children who might not have come without the added attraction of a zoological novelty.

“These guys literally can take out all the willows (rimming the pond) so that it looks like a hedge. It would take me a month to do what they do in a week.”

The rodents of unusual size haven’t always been so helpful.

Luehmann has had to build weirs, unplug culverts and put up electric fences to mitigate their operations.

“Originally, they were a nuisance,” he said.

He even called conservation officers and requested sterilization to pre-empt further problems, which the officers resisted.

Luehmann noted the beavers usually “disappear down Fox Farm Road” for the summer, but this year have opted to set up shop right across the highway.

“I’ve seen the culvert. It’s probably half-blocked. Whether they’d continue to block it is anybody’s guess,” Luehmann said.

“Hopefully, the little buggers are smart enough ... to come back on the property.

“Maybe if there’s enough public outcry they might leave them alone ... but Highways is Highways, and government is government,” he added.

When “human-beaver conflict” is reported, conservation officers investigate and consider multiple resolutions, Environment Yukon stated.

A “minor intervention” like a fence is one possibility.

“If a minor intervention is not possible, then the options are to relocate or humanely destroy the beavers(s),” spokesperson Melissa Madden wrote in an email.

While relocation often seems more appealing, beavers are loath to leave their homes and could have trouble surviving in a new location, where they may be in competition with other beavers, she said.

“First, they need to be located in an area free of other beavers, re-build their houses, which uses up a significant amount of time and energy.

“If the beavers are nurturing their young while rebuilding, they will use up even more energy.

“And even if the beavers successfully rebuild, when winter comes, they may not have enough food stored to survive,” Madden explained.

“Additionally, trapping beavers is high-risk – they readily overheat when held in traps, very stressful, and it is difficult to capture the entire family group.”