Owls Aren't Wise and Bats Aren't Blind Read Online Free PDF Page B

with a musky scent.
    OUTSIDE ITS NORMAL AQUATIC SURROUNDINGS, THE MUSKRAT
(ONDATRA
ZIBETHICA) IS OFTEN MISIDENTIFIED AS A RAT, THAT IS, EITHER THE NORWAY OR COMMON RAT
(RATTUS NORVEGICUS)
OR THE BLACK OR ROOF RAT
(RATTUS RATTUS).
On several occasions I’ve had someone tell me, with either a shudder or with loathing in the voice, “A great, fat rat crossed the road in front of me. It was
huge,
just disgusting!” Or “I looked out my window, and there was the biggest rat I’ve ever seen coming up out of the water. It was awful!” After a few inquiries about specifics of the animal in question—size, shape, color, and related characteristics—it became clear that the creature being discussed wasn’t the hated and feared Norway rat, but the very distantly related and wholly innocuous muskrat.
    Rats have earned their reputation as one of mankind’s greatest scourges— destructive disease carriers that have afflicted humans down through the centuries. After all, they were the primary carriers of bubonic plague—the fearsome Black Death of the Middle Ages that decimated Europe—as well as a major source of typhus. Further, their destruction of grain supplies and damage to many other things of value to humans have made them even more feared and despised. Norway and black rats are also immigrants from Europe and represent perhaps our most unfortunate importation of nonnative wildlife.

    Beaver; muskrat
    The muskrat, on the other hand, is a native of North America. Far from being highly destructive and a carrier of disease, it’s of great benefit to many forms of wildlife and of considerable value to humans. This interesting midsized rodent deserves to be more widely recognized and appreciated.
    Even those who recognize the muskrat and don’t confuse it with the common rat often tend to think of it as a sort of junior edition of the beaver. In fact, the muskrat is very much its own man, so to speak—related to neither Norway rat nor beaver except by virtue of belonging to the order Rodentia. This order, incidentally, comprising some three thousand species worldwide, is the largest of all mammalian orders.
    Despite some similarities to beavers in such things as appearance and habitat, muskrats are far more closely related to voles, those plump little short-tailed rodents that most of us call meadow mice. It’s not stretching things much to say that the muskrat is a very large, aquatic vole, and some scientists have actually described it in that fashion.
    The origin of the muskrat’s name itself is fascinating. We might reasonably deduce that it derives from a combination of the muskrat’s long, naked tail and the slightly musky odor produced by its scent glands—but we would be wrong! Rather, the name is the product of a peculiar twist of language called
folk etymology.
    Etymology is the study of word derivations, and folk etymology is the modification of an unfamiliar word by incorrect usage into something with more familiar elements. Although European settlers occasionally adopted—usually in somewhat corrupted form—Native American names for creatures with which they were unfamiliar, they tried to avoid that practice wherever possible. Their avoidance took the path either of naming a North American creature for something at least vaguely similar from Europe, or of using folk etymology to transform the name into something “sensible.”
    In the present instance, the name of this little marsh-dwelling rodent was originally
musquash
in the Algonquian language. That name made little sense to the colonists, who observed that this creature could give off a musky scent and had a long, naked tail a bit like that of a Norway rat. Put these two observations—musk and rat—together and they sounded quite similar to musquash, yet seemed to make perfectsense. Voilà, Monsieur Muskrat!
    As already noted, the muskrat looks much like a small beaver except for its tail, which is nothing like the beaver’s except that it’s