Muskrat Love

Near where I live is a lovely meandering wetland. Occupied by the usual red-winged blackbirds, frogs and cattails, it also contains one other animal that I've discovered comes with some very weird baggage.

This member of the rodent family has been proliferating throughout my swamp lately. And while it's an interesting creature, every time I mention it to people, they almost always start humming, or whistling, or worse, singing a particular song that was strangely popular back in 1976.

Can you guess what I'm talking about? It's muskrats. If you have no idea what song I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky! If you do get that Captain and Tenille song stuck in your head, my apologies.

The reason that I notice my local swamp bunnies, as they are sometimes called, were experiencing population surge, is that their strikingly unique mudhuts were mushrooming all over the swamp.

Like beavers, muskrats like to build lodges, but with mud and grasses instead of mud and sticks. They build a series of these four to five foot tall conical houses, where they live in large family groups.

A muskrat house is apparently not a peaceful place. Despite the song, muskrats aren't that cute. They're more fighters than lovers - in fact, they're well-known cannibals.

Anyway, being quite common, you've probably seen muskrats and not even known it. They are often mistaken for beavers, with whom they share the same habitat and swimming style. The key is to watch for the tail. Muskrats will trail a long, scaly, rodent-like one behind them in the water. Beavers, of course, have that wide, flat tail that they will often whack loudly. Be happy if you do hear that slap, because then no one will be inspired to sing that song!