Marsh Rabbits and Lake-Cow Bacon: CPTC's Muskrats.
This morning was eventful. Last week was bog-slogging in the best possible way (me in a rowboat, with everyone else plying their wetsuits) against 39.9-degree water as Flett Creek is explored, yet again. Cool things were discovered. Cooler things got away. If you do not have this attitude, you simply do not have what it takes to work in environmental science technologies. Overcome this fear, and you, too, may be in the Flett someday, spitting into your snorkel mask and poking at mink scat like our Dr. Faust when not re-attaching temperature sensors with the City of Tacoma:
Or, you can be like Kathryn Smith, who teaches her students embarrassing ways to die every summer from not paying attention to the rules. The choice is always yours.++
Spring will be here before you know it. In the wake of the snowstorm that flattened the Wet Side of the Mountains, meltwater is choking the waterways. The Flett is full, but nothing like it was in January. This excess water is being hailed with delight. Not that we love overburdened water systems, but more water means more space, and more space means more things to fill it up. Every time we get a 'flush' of water in the Flett Creek swamplands, I see a new wave of interesting activity. And, Flett Creek is already interesting. I don't say that about just any surface-water-holding basins, BTW. This girl is all about karst, but there's an intricacy to the Flett that compels me to think of this stream in capital letters. In the Puget Trough (that's the landed area of Puget Sound) some waterbodies stand out.
Now. My eyesight isn't the best. To look at my optical Rx is to have a long, hard laugh. In compensation I look for tones instead of colors, and pattern recognition. That's part and parcel of growing up in a claustrophobic river valley where a headwaters hiccup translates to 12' of floodwater with a cap of broken ice the size of brass bathtubs.*
But driving to the CPTC wetlands, you get pretty familiar with what is and is not there. Grebes like water deep enough to dive. Ringneck ducks and scoters are all over the map. Buffleheads pack up, and gadwalls and mallards nibble at the banks of the wetlands, looking for juicy worms. I expected gadwall around the edges, but, in the corner of #4 Retention Pond there was an active little collection of ripples that seemed...different. Not birdlike. The ripples were rounded, incessant, and shallow as opposed to what a waterfowl would make.
I had to pull over.
The waterfowl in the pond had, in the swift manner of winter waterfowl, changed in the past few days. There were ringneck ducks:
Pied-billed grebe (the closest we'll ever get to a psychotic paddle-rooster):
...a sudden uptick in the Green-winged teal population:
CPTC's very own Fall-thru-Winter Quarter residents, the American Wigeon (swimming, as usual, just below the fracture limit of sound):
The so-called Common Gadwall, which is anything but common (but that's a future article):
...and those pesky Barrow's Goldeneyes, who never, ever pause for the camera, but will linger at some grotesque pose as if to convey the feeling they're trying to come up with a truly stupendous insult to your IQ even as they debate on whether or not you're worth it:
...did I ever mention those snow-white side feathers are so bloody white the camera throws off a glare in even cloudy days? This is a bird with safety reflectors, folks!
And there we go.
Anonymous lumps of brown fur can only be a few things in the Flett watershed. Otters, Muskrats, Mink, or Nutria. While I know there have been reports of nutria (eek), they are much too large to be the little cat-sized critter busily eating plants in the corner of the pond. Nutria look like an unsanctioned lab experiment on capybara and Tacoma Warf Rats. That is, if you're feeling charitable to them... ..Otherwise, try not to think of The Princess Bride too awful much.
I was seven years old in the unrelenting hell that was Katie Porterfield's first grade classroom (yelling, screaming and shaking you like a snowglobe being common methods of morale improvement and obedience), so I read a lot of RANGER RICK as an escape. That was when I first learned of the nutria. And how even back in the mid-1970's, people were thinking, "oh, hecka-no."
Funny thing, really. Humans have a...complicated relationship with our prey-species....People's Exhibit A, because you are such lucky, lucky folks, you get to take a peek at a legendarily terrible movie involving Giant killer rabbits:
Or to quote one of the actors, DeForrest Kelley (Star Trek's Dr. McCoy) upon reading his script: "Killer rabbits! My God!"
So why do we have to endure nutria all the way up here? Because people can't leave well enough alone, and nutria are worse than anything coming out of the fevered brain of Patrick F. McManus. In case you've never read A FINE AND PLEASANT MISERY, trust me when I say, McManus' brain is pretty fevered and it is all inspired by the Great and Terrible Outdoors.
Nutria have been here, sadly, since Harrison was president (that's too long ago, BTW, and 1889 if you insist on using a calendar). See, there was a demand for furs. They ate watery plants nothing else wanted (so everyone thought), and you could skin them and sell the furs and throw the carcasses to your hogs or alligators or whatever else you were farming.
And then, the fur market went the way of the Wrangel Island Mammoth (that is, an agonizing death), and lo, it was simpler to just let the nutria out of their cages than deal with them. Not that we've ever learned from this lesson, oh, no. Florida is still messed up from all the horrible little monkeys MGM left behind after filming those TARZAN flicks from the 30's-and-40's. Granted, the equally invasive python are now more of a problem, but still...this sort of proves my point...
Humans. This is 95.9% why Kathy Smith tells you about Occupational Darwin Awards in her classes.
Below: The Arrogant Worms say it best (again) with HISTORY IS MADE BY STUPID PEOPLE.
领英推荐
So, what we have here is a native muskrat, or, if you are a sensible Canadian, musquash. Because there is no 'rat' in muskrat. Anyway, they eat more than an ordinary rat ever would--a whopping third of their body weight every day, and within an incredibly tiny range--maybe a little over 46 meters away from their home. And what do they love to eat? CATTAILS. They also use cattails for their bedding and housing.
If there are no cattails, they'll do like pandas and go for non-plant things like bugs, fish, even small critters like frogs and lizards. Any port in a storm. But even though they are nowhere near as fast to breed as nutria, they can overwhelm the local area until humans step in, and then...we have more fur trappers and...well...gourmet dining. Don't eat marsh rabbit in the fancy restaurants if you don't want to eat muskrat. Although, it probably tastes like rabbit, which is just another form of defaulted chicken. It's also 29.99/lb in the meat market so...
Take a look above, and you have an inkling how the muskrat earned its name among the Eastern Woodlanders. 'musquash' is close to the words, 'it is red'. This can help you ID the small, chicken-sized little beast. Remember it is not a beaver, nor a rat, and doesn't even make a good rodent. It is closer to the lemming and vole than our bubonic-carrying buddy rattus.
Despite the nutria, muskrats are hanging in there and even if they aren't in our supermarkets, they sure are a reason to go shopping in the Flett if you are a predator.
Lake Cow Bacon
And now, a brief explanation about the title. Lake Cow Bacon. that was almost a thing. Bad as nutria are, we know things can get worse, and we dang near dodged that bullet by the skin of our teeth.
You see, less than 20 years after the nutria were brought to our country in the hopes of being the perfect solution to a problem that never really existed...somebody had the bright idea to bring hippos to our country as a way of fixing up the 1) invasive water hyacinth problem and 2) supplying a market that was craving more meat than it could produce.
Wonder how the bison felt about that...
So, some really insane parties reasoned, we could solve our problems by bringing hippopotamus ranching into the country. This required a lot of work, approval in Congress, and the ability to...put more Water Hyacinth in the wetlands so the hippos could eat the Water Hyacinth...yes, you read this correctly. The hippos were supposed to control the water hyacinth problem by being farmed and feeding them farmed water hyacinth.
I AM NOT EVEN REMOTELY KIDDING ABOUT THIS CRAZY SCHEME.
LAKE COW BACON ALMOST HAPPENED.
Seriously, this is a blockbuster film waiting to happen, but it is so ridiculously kookoo-bananas, even that grandiose who-needs-a-script-and-who-cares-about-plot-integrity Tom Cruise couldn't do this manic chapter in history justice even if he retconned MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE into the sequel of YELLOW SUBMARINE and paid Uriah Heep to score the soundtrack.
I suggest instead, an alternative history series that's a fun, if rather violent Riverboat Gambler and Feral Hippos series. (re-reads that last sentence. wonders if there is ever a pacifist riverboat gambler series...outside of Maverick, anyway... I've read them and I score it a 7 on my 1-10 scale of 'gift-giving for relatives who don't take the environment seriously':
So, folks, be happy that we missed some 'overly interesting times' in our country (please thank the sudden success of agricultural industries for this), and if you happen to be plagued with muskrats, remember the following:
1) Enthusiastic but not invasive (predators and their own behaviors work on that)
2) Delicious to the local chapter of 'Support Your Local Predator'
3) Better than Nutria.
4) Definitely better than Lake Cows.
Next...our friend the otters have returned!
Hip-hip hooray!
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Previous Article: Ice Flowers of the Flett: The Physics of Beauty
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* Seriously, folks. Check the height on the scars of those sycamore trees before you buy that riverbank real estate. Otherwise you'll learn which is harder: Drama in the January Thaw, or the naked pity of your old-timey neighbors.
++ Unless there's a volcano. Nobody ever expects the volcano.