Cliff wrote:

>I finally saw the critter down at the Golden Garden Ponds in good light,
>and it looks to me to be a Muskrat. The one I saw today looks like the
>same one I saw on about five previous occasions since I first wrote, but
>today it was also mostly out of the water munching on shoreline
>vegetation and it was a clear sunny day. I talked to a parks dept.
>employee the other day and he has had reports of Beaver as well as Mink
>and Muskrat at the ponds, pretty cool for an urban two year old wetland.
>What I saw was not a Beaver, but there is a tree across the pond that's
>completely girded - it looks well munched-on. <<snip>>

This is not about birds so those who like to keep this list avian-only
can delete now. I just returned from a couple of weeks on the Fraser
Lowlands south of Vancouver, BC. My mother's father - like many at that
time - ran a trapline out in the Colebrook area of south Surrey to try to
make it through the dirty 30s. He kept at it through the 1960s after
which he passed it on to my younger brother (I can still remember the
smell of Gramp's "ratshack").

Muskrats were abundant in this ecoregion up until the past couple of
years. Indeed, one can check every ditch in the Delta municipality these
days and not see a single muskrat. Nobody I have talked to has any idea
what could have precipitated such a population collapse.

- Jack

---------------------------
Jack Bowling
Prince George, BC
jbowling at direct.ca