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!