A road map for iguanas
Palm Beach County is laced with drainage canals, and iguanas use them like a road map. The big managed channels — the C-51 through Wellington and West Palm, the C-15 in Delray, the C-17 / Thompson River up in Palm Beach Gardens, the E-4 in Boynton — connect to a dense web of neighborhood and community canals.
The soft banks give them ideal burrowing ground, and the water lets them move between properties without ever really being exposed. That's how a yard nowhere near the ocean still ends up with an iguana problem: the canal system reaches inland everywhere.
Why canal-side lots are tough to clear
Canal-side lots are some of the toughest to clear for the same reason as the Intracoastal: the animals den in the bank, dive when disturbed, and travel to the next property along the water. A one-time clear-out just refills from up and down the canal within days.
- Burrows honeycomb the soft canal bank and undermine the slope
- Animals dive into the canal and travel to the next lot
- Connected feeder canals continuously repopulate a cleared stretch
- Inland properties get pressure with no ocean or lagoon nearby
Mapping, collapse, and monitoring
We map the burrows along your stretch of bank, remove what's there, and collapse and pack the dens so the wall or slope is sound again. Where a community owns miles of canal frontage, a monitored program along the edge is what actually holds the line — a one-time clear-out just refills from farther up the canal.
Common questions
My house isn't on the ocean but I still have iguanas — why?
The canal network reaches inland everywhere. Iguanas travel the C-51, C-15, and neighborhood canals and burrow into the banks, so canal-backed lots get pressure well away from the coast.
Can you clear a whole community's canal frontage?
Yes. We map the bank, remove and collapse burrows, and run a monitored program along the edge, because a one-time clear-out just refills from farther up the canal.
Do the burrows damage the canal bank?
They do. The dens honeycomb the soft slope and can undermine seawalls, retaining edges, and the bank itself, which is why collapsing and packing them properly matters.
