Turns out newspapers don’t like to find out letters are stealing from the SF Chronicle. The editor wrote me back and said something very confirming about “Chagrin” and added the link AND the attribution. Next time I’ll know what to do.
Editor’s note: Since this letter was published in EW, we have learned that it draws heavily and without attribution on a column by Heidi Perryman published in the San Francisco Chronicle on June 26.
This nice description of the muskrat contribution comes from author Susan Pike in the Foster’s Daily Democrat. I have been hearing a lot of things about how they contribute to healthy marshes and her explanation really helped.
Muskrat love: Overlooked mammal keeps wetlands and marshes healthy
Muskrats tend to get overlooked — we’re all aware of beavers and their role in building wetlands with their dams and impacting surrounding woodlots by cutting down valuable timber, but you don’t hear much about muskrats. Muskrats are, in fact, invaluable wetland engineers, removing extra plants and making sure waterways are clear. They carve channels through dense cattail or pickerel stands that lead into and out of their lodges (trappers routinely set their traps along these canals). These provide space for other plants and animals, helping to keep a marsh from becoming a monoculture. They also slow the process of succession in a marsh where the buildup of dead vegetation causes the marsh to fill in and become a field. Muskrats help keep the perfect mix of water and vegetation in marshes.
Oh okay, beavers can share some of the credit I guess. I was especially happy that it was published with photos of ACTUAL MUSKRATS not nutria or ground hog. She has some cool facts about them too that I didn’t know. Did you know they had lips inside their teeth like beavers so they can chew underwater? I didn’t. And did you know they can stay under for up to 17 minutes?
Without the muskrat, our secret marsh would probably be a monoculture of cattails or perhaps would have become so clogged with dead cattails and sediment that it would be well on its way to becoming dry land. This hidden marsh is a reminder to me that nature is a wonderful balancing act; that unlikely characters, the muskrat in this case, can have subtle feedbacks on a system that are critical for the health of that system – n this case maintaining a healthy marsh.
