Why Laughlin Ranch's Fairways Feel Quieter This Summer, and Why It Won't Last

Golfers who play Laughlin Ranch have swapped notes for years about the same detail: somewhere between the tee box and the green, a burro shows up. One review even measured the animals' manners, noting that their droppings stayed politely in the rough and off the actual playing surface. A Mohave Valley Daily News photo caption from last year placed a specific pair on the course's 10th fairway, proof in print of something every regular player already knew from experience.

This summer, several residents have noticed something different. Fewer burros on the cart paths. Quieter mornings near the 10th and 17th. The instinct is to assume the problem got fixed, that whatever wildlife management effort was underway finally worked.

It didn't, and understanding why matters more than the sighting itself.

The Math Behind the Quiet

Laughlin Ranch sits inside the Black Mountain Herd Management Area, a 1.1 million acre stretch of Bureau of Land Management territory that runs along the Colorado River's eastern shoreline from Hoover Dam south to Interstate 40. The federal government sets a target population for this land, called the Appropriate Management Level, at 478 burros. As of March 2026, the actual estimated population was approximately 3,896, more than eight times what the land is designated to sustain.

That gap is the real story. Between April 1 and July 15, 2026, the BLM's Kingman Field Office ran a gather across the Black Mountain HMA, removing up to 500 burros using bait and water traps rather than helicopters. The animals were transported to the Axtell Off-Range Corral in Utah, checked by a veterinarian, and prepared for the agency's Adoption and Sales Program.

Five hundred sounds like a meaningful number until you set it against 3,896. The gather barely moved the population toward the 478 target. It thinned the herd enough that a homeowner walking the course in August might genuinely see fewer animals than in April, but it left the underlying overpopulation almost entirely intact.

A Herd That Keeps Rebounding

This isn't the first time the BLM has tried to bring the Black Mountain herd back toward its target, and the recent history shows why one gather rarely holds.

Read across that table and the pattern is clear. A major removal in 2022 brought the count down near 1,674 by early 2023. By March 2026, three years later, the population had more than doubled again, landing higher than where it stood before the 2022 gather even started.

The BLM's own reasoning explains the rebound. Wild burros have essentially no natural predators in this landscape, and left unmanaged, a herd can double in size roughly every five years. A gather that removes 500 or even 1,000 animals slows the growth curve. It does not reset it. For anyone living inside the Black Mountain HMA, that means the herd isn't a problem that gets solved once. It's a population that gets managed in cycles, indefinitely.

What the 2026 Gather Was Actually For

The BLM has been consistent across multiple gathers about why this matters beyond rangeland health. Public safety and roadway collisions sit at the center of it. Bullhead City's earlier gathers in 2018 and 2019 were specifically framed around burros congregating near U.S. Highway 95, and this year's operation logged at least one documented death: a jack euthanized after injuries consistent with being hit by a vehicle.

That detail is worth sitting with if you drive Bullhead Parkway at dusk, or if you've ever come around a blind curve near the course entrance and found a burro standing in the lane. The animals are most active at dawn and dusk, the same hours a lot of residents are out walking, golfing early to beat the heat, or driving home from dinner. The gather wasn't cosmetic. It was a response to real incidents involving vehicles and property.

Living Alongside a Herd That Isn't Leaving

Here's the piece that doesn't change no matter how many burros get gathered in a given year: they're not going anywhere as a species from this landscape, and legally, they're not supposed to. The Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 designates these animals as protected, describing them in the law's own language as "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West." The BLM's job isn't to remove the herd. It's to keep the herd's size somewhere survivable for both the burros and the rangeland they depend on.

For Laughlin Ranch residents, that means treating burro sightings as a permanent feature of the neighborhood rather than a temporary nuisance that this year's gather resolved. A few practical habits go a long way:

• Don't feed them. It draws burros toward roads, driveways, and cart paths where the collision risk is highest, and it works against everything the gather was trying to accomplish.
• Give them room, especially early morning and early evening when they're most active and most likely to be near the course or Bullhead Parkway.
• If you see an injured or aggressive animal, contact the BLM Kingman Field Office rather than approaching. Handling sick or hurt wildlife isn't something residents should take on themselves.
• Expect the population to climb again over the next few years. That's not a failure of this year's gather. It's how the math has worked every time before.

The quiet fairways this summer are real, and they're also temporary in a specific, predictable way. Somewhere in the next three to five years, the Black Mountain herd will likely be back near where it stood in March, and another gather will follow. That rhythm, not a one-time fix, is what living in this particular stretch of the Colorado River corridor actually looks like.

If you're curious what a home inside Laughlin Ranch is worth in today's market, burros and all, Crystal Fletcher is a phone call away and happy to talk through it.