Category: New Species

Muskrat love?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, New Species July 8, 2014

Mary Sonis: Muskrat love: An expose

The muskrat is a prolific water rodent that can be found in most slow creeks and ponds throughout North America. Romance in early spring is not characterized by candlelight and dancing (and yes, those are actual lyrics) but by the bloodbath that occurs between males fighting for territory and breeding rights.

Muskrats are feisty, and will often fight to the death before breeding begins. Generally, the females are not involved in this fray, but they do wander the pond in breeding season, emitting small squeaks that advertise their availability. Once the female has found a mate, it is a fairly monogamous relationship, and she will often produce as many as three litters in a season. A typical litter will average six kits, primarily cared for by their mother. She raises them in a den that is a loosely built mound of grasses set high to avoid spring floods.

This is a cute article about an oft-overlooked species, but I’m not sure about the word bloodbath? We haven’t seen tons of suffering males in our creek? I remember one muskrat years ago that looked like it had a bight taken out of its side, but the teeth marks were way bigger than a muskrat. More like dog.

Blood bath?

The coolest footage I ever saw of a muskrat was on Moses’ camera. A mated pair worked together to chase a hungry mink away from their nest. Muskrats at war, popping up out of the water all over squeaking furiously until that mink threw in the towel and swam away! It was so brave!

Of course in 8 years of observation I’ve admittedly never seen this….

It is a disaster for any photographer when a muskrat appears on the scene. Ever alert, the muskrat will thwack its tail on the water, darting in circles of alarm, causing all nearby wildlife to flee.

What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just enjoy a nice cheerful muskrat article without thinking the author is insane? Or mixing up species? Of course I went looking for more references to muskrats sounding the alarm by smacking their tails. Maybe they’re just lazy in Martinez? What do I know? You can guess how many other references I found to these muskrat security services. It’s a round number.

Well, I did find this one from Harper’s magazine in 1919 by Walter Pritchard Eaton called “Little folks who gnaw”. Which is also a cute article. And similarly colorful.

And there you have it. This clearly happened once upon a time 100 years ago, maybe her bloodthirsty muskrats are just behind the times? Rip Van Muskrat?

Or maybe I’m just wrong and missing something. It happens. Write me your own sightings of muskrat tail-thumping and set me straight? Footage would be awesome. I know beaver and muskrats learn a lot from each other.

One last complaint: who in their right mind would name this adorable baby “pickles”?

**Pickles** the beaver is one of many wildlife orphans who has been helped by Critter Care wildlife rehabilitation centre in South Langley. The organization holds its annual open house on Saturday and Sunday.
— image credit: Contributed photo

Brace yourselves

heidi08 New Species, Who's Killing Beavers Now? May 5, 2014

There’s some mighty beaver-stupid to talk about today, but I promise to reward you afterwards with something adorable from this morning’s visit. I promise it will be worth it. First the heavy lifting:

Beaver bounty hunter: “tail” it to the jury

He’s a bounty hunter, make no mistake about it. Johnny Vead does not look like Steve McQueen from the old television Western, nor does he look like Dog, the mullet-wearing “brah” of more recent TV fame.

But he is a bounty hunter. Vead doesn’t chase bail jumpers — he chases tail thumpers. Beavers, that is. Brown gold. Symbol of industriousness, determination, good dental hygiene — and Canada. Builder of dams and flooder of fields. The pudgy, flat-tailed, buck-toothed web-footed “water rat” has made it to the top of the Police Jury’s most-wanted list. Since signing on as the Police Jury’s hit man for beavers, Vead has been bringing in a few tails a day. Not enough to put a dent in the “dam” things, but at least he’s gnawing away at their numbers. Should one of his captives protest his innocence, Vead will probably just tell him, “tail it to the jury — the police jury.” (Sorry, I promise that was the last beaver-related pun.) The Police Jury pays Vead $40 per tail. That is all they want or care about. The pelt, the meat and everything else is Vead’s to do with as he wishes.

The police jury is a Lord-of-the-Flies-type legislative and executive body unique to many of Louisiana’s parishes. Avoyelles is about smack dab in the middle of the state, and this parish has made the decision to handle their beaver problems by paying a trapper $40.00 a tail. Apparently the reporter is so excited by his own bounty hunter analogy that he couldn’t be bothered to use paragraphs. Or maybe they’re just outlawed in Louisiana?

Forty dollars a tail.

Since the research reports an average of 5 beavers to a colony that’s 200.00 dollars to get rid of a single family of beavers. For a year. Then another 200.00 to get rid of them again. Not to mention all the fish and ducks they’re going to lose every time they pay resident tax dollars to ruin their creek. A smart person would point out that they could easily take that money and buy parts for a flow device to fix the problem once and for all, and end up with savings for school lunches or senior programs.

At least they’re wasting their money on an expert:,

“Beavers have it made,” Vead said. “They don’t have to go to work, pay bills, go shopping, pay taxes. They don’t have television, computers or telephones. All they have to do is eat and make baby beavers,” he said with hearty laugh.

Yes everyone knows how lazy beavers are. Never doing any work at all. Sitting on their couches and eating chocolate covered willow leaves. Counting off the days until that 364th one comes and the females enter estrus so they can hurry and make babies. Beavers are so lazy. That must be we have that saying,

“Lazy as a beaver”.

____________________________________________

And now the reward. This is footage from the primary dam this morning. I was happy to see the ducks were back. We saw a female with a new clutch of just-hatched ducklings at the secondary dam on Wednesday. Seven! (Four yellow and three brown.) They were so small they looked like beatles, swimming around excitedly. I waited anxiously to see how they’d do. You know how it is with baby ducks. First you count 7, and then you count 5, and then there are three. It’s a dangerous world out there. We saw them again this morning, bigger – more like hamsters now. Check out the view from this morning and count for yourself.

Wanna Be-avers

heidi08 Beavers, Educational, Environmental, New Species April 6, 2014

This morning started with a power outage and the usual slow dawning of understanding what that means – Ohh no power in this room either, no heater, no computer, no router, no clock. In case you’re in the beavers neighborhood, reading this on your phone, this is what PGE says:

Outage Details START TIME:APR 6, 4:07 AM
ESTIMATED RESTORATION:APR 6, 8:30 AM
CUSTOMERS AFFECTED:1397
CAUSE:Unknown – PG&E is investigating the cause.
STATUS:PG&E is assessing the cause at the outage location.
LAST UPDATED: APR 6, 6:27 AM

Back on at 7:05. So lets talk about muskrats with this article from Jim Mcormac from the Dispatch in Ohio:

Muskrat deserves love as vital vole of wetlands

I just have to love any article that starts like this:

In the beginning, Kitchi-Manitou, creator of Earth, populated the lands with the Anishinabe. After these original peoples descended into conflict and war, Kitchi-Manitou flooded the lands in retribution. Nanaboozhoo was the sole survivor, along with a handful of animals. One of them was a muskrat. From their log ark, Nanaboozhoo sent the muskrat diving below the floodwaters. It returned with a pawful of earth, and from that the lands were re-created.

— Ojibway legend

I’ve written natural history columns for The Dispatch for a decade — more than 160 pieces on almost as many subjects — but never about the muskrat. Given its prominence in creation lore, an essay on the “earth diver” is overdue.

Although muskrats resemble beavers, they are only distant relatives of the much larger rodents. The muskrat is related to mice and voles, and is essentially a supersize aquatic vole. A hefty muskrat might weigh 4 pounds; a big beaver can be 70 pounds. Beavers also have a horizontally flattened tail, while the muskrat’s is laterally compressed, as if compacted in a vise.

Muskrats are an important cog in wetland ecology. They are prolific grazers of aquatic plants and help to keep marshes open and free of choking growth. Semiopen marshes usually support greater animal diversity, including waterfowl. The lodges literally support ducks and geese, which sometimes nest atop the domes.

To which I KNOW the wetland-giving beavers would reply, “You call that biodiversity?” Hrmph!

“Never intended to Hold Water”

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, New Species March 8, 2014

Busy beavers causing headache for HamCo school district

Jasper — The Hamilton County School District finds themselves in the middle of a beaver dam, so to speak.

What was first falsely diagnosed by an outside firm as a sinkhole on school district property at Hamilton County High School, is actually damage incurred by some busy little beavers, according to Chuck Lambert from General Services.

The beavers have been clogging drainage pipes and tearing up the ground, as well as causing a large hole in the pavement to open up. Because of the hole in the street that the school buses utilize for drop-offs and pickups of students, bus routes around the high school have been temporarily re-routed.

Click on the photo to go to a short film on the story. You might be asking yourself ‘how can beavers dig through asphalt’. Good question. Don’t worry, we answer questions around here. And I saw EXACTLY that hole first hand in my favorite beaver habitat on the border of Nevada. The beavers don’t touch the asphalt. But they dig out the dirt underneath it and when some lovely car (or school bus) drives over it the road crumbles. Where’s Hamilton county you ask? Brace yourselves. It’s in FLORIDA. As in lots and lots of these.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Great Blue Heron and Tail – Loop Road Everglades hp

I’m sure you can understand why the beavers would feel it necessary to build their own pond rather than use one that is already – (ahem) – occupied. (Look closely at the lower right corner.) ( I’m sure alligators eat birds and beavers from time to time, but mostly they can’t be bothered. (Maybe it’s like us driving on the freeway. Sure we know that some people get killed on every freeway every day, but we assume it won’t be us.)

The thing that gets me in that film is the emphasis on the article “Never being intended to hold water”. Obviously, if there’s a culvert, the presence of water was planned for in the original design. The beavers just made it less temporary. Apparently the ditch holds a little more water than your story?

I will write the school about how to install a culvert fence and use the whole beaver pond as a science project to monitor the changes it makes to their ditch, but honestly I’m not expecting many converts.

I miss seeing alligators occasionally. I like their knees. Very Kermit.

The Old Trope about Trophic Cascades

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers elsewhere, New Species February 28, 2014

Original title: Giving wolves credit for everything beavers do.

Tigra Scientifica: Man versus Predator

With predators’ numbers falling in the wild, the rest of the food chain is being forced to adapt.

Do you think lions and tigers and bears are scary? As it turns out, their absence is even scarier. Predator ecology is gaining in popularity, as scientists discover just how crucial top predators — such as lions, tigers and, well, you know the rest — are to the success of an ecosystem.

A prime example of an essential predator is the gray wolf, Canis Lupus. Once a thriving and abundant species, gray wolf populations have been nearly eliminated from 48 U.S. states. The absence of this apex predator has a dramatic top-down effect on the entire ecosystem. With their natural predators removed from the picture, elk populations flourish.

Do you give the pastor credit when the choir sings a truly ‘Amazing Grace’? Sure he plays a role, but he wasn’t singing those notes or practicing in the loft, was he? Now don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of wolves. I love their song and their fur and their social interaction. I loved ‘never cry wolf’ more than any movie I saw in college, and to this day I remember scenes and vivid images from it. But wolves shouldn’t get all the credit for restoring creeks. Wolves don’t build dams or raise the water table or augment the invertebrate community so that we get more fish and more mammals and more birds that eat fish. Beavers do that, and it drives me crazy when they get only an ‘incidental mention’.

In turn, cottonwoods and other trees become elk chow. Fewer trees result in fewer songbirds and fewer resources available for beavers to build dams with. Remove beaver dams from an ecosystem and small ponds also disappear. Eliminating ponds reduces habitats for succulent plants, a critical food source for grizzly bears.

Someday Earth Guardians or Wildlife watch will make a film about how good beavers actually are for the creek and wildlife and it will blow the mind of every single well-meaning person who has sent me the wolf-glorifying film. Wolves make it possible for beavers to weave their magic, and that’s very important. But beavers are the one who do all the work and make the difference. Beavers are the ones who deserve the credit!

Hrmph.

: Wolf and Beaver – you can see the beaver’s tail slapping the surface (click to enlarge) Roads End Naturalist

Today’s donation is a whimsical painting by Suzanne Hunter of Phoenix Arizona called ‘Party in the Den’. Her Etsy shop ‘Red Raven Design‘ features “art with a sense of fun!” She painted the donation specifically for our festival, and her website says, “Yes, these hip beavers are having a cocktail party in the den! You never know what kind of crazy antics these revelers will get into. I did this painting specifically to benefit the beaver restoration project in Martinez, California. I’m all for animal and nature conservation and who doesn’t love the beautiful beavers!”

I love to imagine the beavers in their lodge toasting our success! The painting is colorful fun but honestly my favorite part is what looks like Martini glasses the beavers are holding. How appropriate is that considering our beavers hail from the home town of the Martini? Thank you Suzanne for your wonderful support! How did you know?