Never did I intend this blog to be so consumed with health issues--BO-RING! But those have consumed me of late, mostly because of not having a definitive diagnosis to explain all my increasingly debilitating symptoms. At last, we seem to be on the right track vis-a-vis both of those things. I'm still convinced it's mytonoic dystrophy or something very similar, and I'm waiting for a date for my consultation at the Johns Hopkins Muscular Dystrophy Clinic, which wonderful Dr. A is referring me to. Alas, I thought a DNA blood test would be cheaper than a spinal tap, but he told me they run something like 2 grand, and he wanted an expert to evaluate me and test me.
More about that in a future episode.
So, WHAT ABOUT MUSKRATS, the title of this episode? You know me. Digression is my middle name.
I moved to Appalachia from the Washington, DC area (actually, I'm from the "People's Republic of Takoma Park" and proud of it) because I fell in love with these mountains and their flora and fauna as a blessed child of the 60's and 70's. My family began vacationing at a charming antebellum mountain resort in West Virginia--Capon Springs and Farms. That place is still my touchstone; it is the one place I can still go to and feel as if I'm close to my parents. It's a very small resort, and I can see my mom over there lying on one of the lounge chairs on the pool deck that spans the stream of healing spring waters the place was first built around. I can see my dad in his army green swimming trunks--knobby knees and varicose veins and freckles on his legs--as he dips into the pool after a day of golfing up on the hill. I can see them in the family-style dining room, chowing down on freshly baked rolls and straight-from-the-farm corn on the cob. And I can see myself as a little girl, wandering the hiking paths and searching for wildlife. I'll save my sad tree frog story for another episode.
So in love with these mountains and their cool under-canopy of magical plants and animals was I that when my folks died during my twenties and I inherited a small amount of money (there were four of us, and my dad lamented the devaluation of his money during the inflated 1980s when they both died), I decided to kiss city life good-bye and find a mountain home. And so I did. Now that my health will no longer be a mystery (hopefully), I intend to talk much more about my little mountain cottage in future episodes. Because of being sick, losing first my teaching job due to illness and now my grant writing job for the same reason, my finances have taken a brutal hit, but I've managed to hang onto that little cottage. It's in a rather deplorable state at the moment, but it's not that far off from utter cuteness, so I'll keep you up to date on its rehabilitation as we go.
The water pipes froze and burst during this horrendous winter--and I wish to high heaven this winter would release us from its icy grip! It's the end of March and still as cold as a witch's teat out there. (Thank you, J. D. Salinger, for giving me that expression through Holden Caulfield's stream of consciousness--I like to give credit for my favorite verbal constructions if they came from someone else.) FINALLY, having just cashed out my retirement to live on until and if I begin receiving my Disability payments, I could afford to hire my wonderful plumber, Joseph Smith. (I'm an ex-Mormon, and I'd be far more willing to follow THIS honest and good plumbing man than the charlatan with the same name that started that so-called church). So FINALLY, the house has water flowing through its veins again! The best part of this is that my son can move back in--he's been shuffled from pillar to post since the water exploded. And the next best part of this is that I can go back in and start to clean and spruce up the place, a very fun thing to do when the weather gets nice. We're barely able to keep the house warm enough for human habitation right now with (very expensive) electric heaters--though we're firing up the dusty old wood/coal furnace when we can get some fuel for it. Everything costs.
I bought the house mostly for the plot of land it lies on--my dream of a woodsy cottage came true when I first laid eyes on the place. You have to use your imagination to see it as a cottage, though--it's more like a boring white rambler, one step up from a trailer. But there are oak floors and window frames throughout, and I'm working to up the charm factor on the outside as well. My favorite addition thus far is a set of French doors off my kitchen, opening up the private, woodsy mountainside behind the house to us even when warm and cozy inside. Now what I need to do is figure out how I'm going to heat the place--my oil tank is rusted, my oil furnace is rusted, and the coal/wood furnace is a beast that needs to be updated. What to do? And we NEED heat in these mountains. Other Marylanders probably have no idea of the winters we endure out here in Allegany and, even worse, Garrett counties.
I'm in a neighborhood just out of town, but I have no neighbors next to or behind me other than sugar maples, basswoods, pin oaks, and other lovely trees. The lane in front of the house is not heavily traveled since it ends on top of the "little" toe of Savage Mountain that cradles my yard. The road becomes dirt and traverses the coal mine up there--fortunately, Maryland doesn't allow mountaintop removal, and mined areas have to be reclaimed when the ugly work is done. Even more fortunately, when the blasting goes on I hear none of it--the noise passes soundlessly right over my house--but an ex-boyfriend who lives on the other side of the little creek valley that separates me from the main part of town could hear it loud and clear! Just got lucky with that one.
On my first tour of the house, the former owner pointed out some nasty looking metal traps in the basement and said he trapped muskrats with them and offered to leave them. "No, thanks," I told him (as IF), and thought little of it again. He also told me he hunted 'sang (ginseng) in the woods, but I've yet to find any. I've found its look-alike, a related sarsapirilla, but it doesn't have the magical qualities attributed to true ginseng, unfortunately, though I could make root beer with it, I suppose. I'm thinking about starting a 'sang farm in my woods, though, because the conditions are just right. I already transplanted some ramps there that are doing great--I have to be sure they don't take over the whole place and force out the may apple, trillium, and Jack-in-the-Pulpit. That would be tragic, indeed.
I've had the place for twenty years, and furry pests weren't a problem for the first ten years because of our sweet black lab, Susie. Once, I found a large dead rodent outside that looked like a big rat--it was close to a foot long. I shivered--I certainly don't want rats around the house! I'm an animal lover, but I do have limits. I consoled myself that this guy didn't look like the dog-sized Norway rats running through the streets in DC at 3 in the morning after a night on the town (for me). In fact, as I scooped this one up in a shovel to throw it in the woods, I couldn't help but notice the beauty of its coat. No dull gray this--the coat was a medley of golds and coppers and browns so beautiful it amazed me. No blood on the animal--Susie must have snapped its neck with her jaws, as dogs tend to do to kill their prey.
Some years later, I was in my basement going through the laundry on the floor (hey, I'm NOT the world's best housekeeper by far--ADHD, after all--but I DO try!) As I lifted a comforter to stuff into the washer, a sort of squat, fat critter fell out and waddled off into the dark. I shrieked, of course--no one wants to be surprised by a critter of any size or shape in one's home--even a baby bunny in the house can be disconcerting. I described this to said ex-boyfriend across the valley, and he said, "Oh, no. You might have rats."
Of course, I was utterly freaked. I got all the laundry washed and looked everywhere for rat scat but saw none. I could only hope that I'd scared the beast out of the house, and I didn't see any more signs of it or its cronies after that. Maybe it had decided this wasn't such a great place to nest after all.
Fast forward to about five years ago--visions of rats and said ex-boyfriend ancient history. In the lane just past my home one evening lay a Very Large Critter. At first glance, I assumed it was a groundhog. We have lots of those around, though fortunately I haven't had any close enough to my home to threaten my garden, but both my son and I had noticed one or two of late--or at least we thought they were woodchucks. The animal lay in the lane between the wooded lot next to me and a horse pasture that had three horses in it when I first bought the house--a major bonus was looking out my front picture window and seeing those equine beauties. Sadly, my neighbor tells me now the pretty red stable is filled with her son's storage items, so no more horses.
So, between the woods and the pasture and beneath the lane is a drainage pipe, as that (actually very large) toe of Savage Mountain that looms behind my house and robs me of direct sunlight at 4 pm every day drains here through the major boulder field next to me that has thus far happily precluded building on that lot. Until city water was added, in fact, 18 families in the neighborhood (including mine) got their water through piping from the spring that opens out there. Good to know in case the end of the world as we know it should happen, which seems more likely every day--and that wonderful plumber I already mentioned left the pipe from the spring with a new nozzle on the end should that happen.
Now a Very Large Critter lay in the middle of the lane, its back toward me. Simply having to know what it was, I approached it. Slowly. It was bigger than any groundhog I'd ever seen. Maybe it wasn't dead and would hop up and bite me. But it moved not at all, and I got close enough to see some strange features: Webbed feet, and a short black leathery tail that sort of flattened out as it left the body. Beaver? I'd seen lots of those during another previous romance with a boyfriend who lived on two reservoirs. We'd canoe and fish those lakes and see many a beaver swimming along near us. As strange as this animal's tail was, though, it wasn't a beaver's. Not large enough or paddle-like enough. And this creature had the most gorgeous coat, a coat so beautiful I'd seen nothing like it before--except I had. That little foot-long creature from years ago--it must have been a baby, or a child, of a big daddy or mama like this one.
Of course, I went inside and started googling like mad to find out what this mystery beast might be. And what should I learn? MUSKRAT! What? I'd pictured muskrats as small rat-like creatures, and nothing more. I knew, though, that muskrats were valued for their fur (I had no idea then I'd also find recipes for the rodents in one of my mom's older cookbooks!), and I recalled those metal traps in the basement. This is how I learned that I share my property and the woods beside it with quite a few of these interesting critters. I have since become a muskrat fan, and NOT because of that goofy song from the 80s.
Once I'd ID'd the thing, I recalled another incident in the cottage that had freaked me out when it happened. This occurred about three years ago or so and led to my obsessively working to seal up my basement, though I'm not sure I've fixed it yet. When I'd bought the house I'd found that the previous owners had covered up a large square hole in the basement's cement floor with a flat pan topped with numerous bricks. Smart me--I took all of that off and left the drain open. Thus, I knew that the two tiny dead baby rodents in my bathtub had scaled the drain pipe all the way from that basement drain to my bathtub on the main floor--quite a feat. And they'd been tiny enough to squeeze through the screw-down drain stopper that is part of the tub. I've since learned that rodents can collapse their backbones to squeeze through openings as small as 1/4 inch--another feat that's pretty amazing--no wonder they get inside human-made buildings so easily!
This incident was before the giant muskrat in the road led to my epiphany, and these unfortunate little babies scared me because I could only think one thing: RATS!!!! They had pointy noses--very pointy--with some whiskers. I could remember seeing cartoons of rats with pointy noses. RATS!!!
But wait--these little guys didn't have a long tail. They had one, but it was only about half as long as I'd expect a rat tail to be. And their back feet were webbed. Long, slender feet with webbed toes. So NOT rats. But relatives, most definitely.
Ashamed that I might have some form of RAT in my house, I scooped them up and discarded them and swore never to tell as soul. Now I wish I'd taken a photo to help with positive identification. Anyway, that's when I became obsessed with ensuring no future rodents would travel up that pipe. I really should get Joseph Smith, Plumber, to bring that thing to code, but that's money I don't have. I do think I more-or-less have the drain situation "fixed" with steel wool, mesh, and flat pans with bricks just like my predecessors', but apparently there's still ways for various rodents to get in, given the family of chattery critters that moved in while the house was abandoned this winter. After one sighting of the sort of squat, medium-length-tailed creature that waddled from under the kitchen couch to somewhere in the newly added bathroom (a necessity when I divided the house into two apartments that are now collapsed back into one, thank goodness), I've tentatively identified them as field voles.
Field voles, it turns out (thanks to several hours of googling their images and information), look like miniature muskrats. This is a good thing when they invade your home--I wouldn't want to face a startled adult muskrat after seeing their full-grown size! Now I'm thinking it far more likely those itty-bitty ratlike babies in my bathtub were, in fact, field voles. And, come to think of it, the one that fell out of my laundry was not nearly big enough to be a nesting muskrat--but probably just the right size to be a field vole. Seeing the one in my kitchen slowish (much slower than a mouse would have run) waddle was strikingly reminiscent of the other one's as it, too, scooted sort of in a blubbery way across the room. Here's a photo of a baby field vole that is older than the two in my house--the two dead babies still had no hair, or very little. In the literature, field voles' noses have been described as rounded, but this little guy's is kind of pointy, the way those babies' were.
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| Baby field vole. Photo from http://www.eroyton.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?id=20818 |
I have to admit, though, these muskrats and field voles are capturing my interest. Field voles are pretty darned cute, and their similarity to muskrats can be seen in the photo below. My son tells me the field vole family chatters with one another when the rest of the house is still, and even he is feeling somewhat protective of them. And I'm excited about having a muskrat habitat, though I've read they can adapt so well to conditions that they are found all over the place, even in drainage ditches in cities, so I guess they aren't all that special. They remain exotic to me, though, and if I'd never bought my "cottage," I'd never have given them a second thought.
Muskrats and humans, other than trappers, don't normally have a lot of interaction, though many a human form has wrapped itself in their uniquely beautiful coats. Muskrats need to live near water, as they feed in water and build their dome-shaped houses in water, meaning they rarely live close to inhabited human dwellings. They are herbivores--vegetarians--and I don't have a lot of wet grasses growing inside the house (actually, I have NO wet grasses growing in the house, in case you missed the understatement). But I do live in the woods, which invites many a stray visitor--when my doggie door was open to the outside, figuring my two mutts would drive out any creature daring to cross its threshold, a large bird found its way in, and until I had the bright idea to open my French doors wide both it and I fluttered around the kitchen in panic. And now I realize that little stream where the spring opens up is a place where these burrowing creatures have made a home. The big square hole in my basement floor is a mere fifteen feet from the spring/stream whence we once got our water, too.
Alas, I wish so much that I could buy the lot next to me, but once again don't have the money. It's been for sale for a couple of years, and fortunately no one has bought it yet. I don't want a house built there, of course, and I'd love to preserve those woods for the little ecosystem they represent. There's a magnificent white oak and some wild cherry trees in there, and I've found blue cohosh there but never on my own property. Remember, I moved to these mountains because I so love the flora and fauna, so I'm happy sharing my space with wildlife--though I prefer it stays outside the confines of my cottage. In addition to muskrats, I've encountered the following critters in my yard over the years:
- Deer (off and on--we have at least one herd in the woods surrounding my place--fortunately not enough to ruin my gardens to date)
- Cottontail bunnies (LOTS!--The only thing they've eaten in my garden is lettuce--go figure)
- Chipmunks (used to be lots until my neighbor failed to spay his cats, and the feral colony has wiped out those cute little ground squirrels--grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr--one of my favorite things at Capon Springs was a garden with a tiny "Chipmunk Crossing" sign in it!)
- Gray squirrels (not as many as we had in Takoma Park! They probably end up in stew pots around here)
- Star-nosed mole (dead but unbloody--another Susie victim)
- Deer mice and other types of mice--I'm no biologist, though I'd like to be!
- Black snake (only two over the years--they aren't bad at all, are actually beneficial because they eat rodents, but they are alarming to see)
- Yellow ring-necked snake--one tiny baby under a brick
- Garter snake
- Skunks (not a lot, fortunately, though in town there's apparently an overrun of same)
- Flock of turkeys--a spectacular site strolling through my snowy woods
- Pileated woodpecker--another spectacular site, almost pterydactyl-like in size and shape flying above--hoped to have them nesting there but a former tenant's paintball games in my woods apparently scared them off
- Hairy and/or downy woodpeckers--I saw a pair just the other day skirting all over the trees; they were probably hairy, as they were pretty big
- Pair of nesting cardinals for many years--didn't see them this year, but I wasn't there much. The feral cats may have scared them away. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. One year I saw the male "hand" up a black sunflower seed from the feeder to his mate, who sat on a branch just above--adorable! And as beautiful as the males are, I really love the female cardinals' coloring as well)
- Indigo bunting--gorgeous!
- Scarlet tanager--gorgeous!
- Ruby-throated hummingbirds
- Nuthatches (both white and gray)
- Tons of chickadee and titmice (titmouses?)
- Wren (not sure of type)
- Mourning dove
- Juncoes (rarely--I don't think they usually come to feeders)
- Baltimore oriole?? I know I saw one, but I'm not sure if it was in my yard.
- Robins (of course)
- Goldfinch (One morning I looked out the window to see what might be at the bird feeder, and I was momentarily confused--the trees had sprouted LEMONS! After a moment I realized a large flock of goldfinch had landed in the branches and were waiting their turn at the feeder)
- Red-spotted newt efts--And yes, I have one held captive, I admit it--they are actually long-lived pets if cared for properly, and mine (Ethel) is in a terrarium filled with the soil and plants she lived with in the wild, and I frequently replenish the leaf litter for more food items--she's made it a year now, though her partner, Fred, was squashed when I was rearranging rocks in the terrarium and had no idea he'd tunneled under the place I was pressing them into the soil--a VERY SAD lesson to learn--who knew they burrowed? Hope to find a replacement this spring, and I will never repeat that mistake
- American toads
- Some type of small gray tree frog - The spring peepers sing a chorus every evening thanks to ponds on the property farther up the mountain from my house
- Luna moths
- Hummingbird moth
- Monarch and other butterflies--I now grow milkweed to try to attract monarchs to the yard
- FREAKY wolf spider
- Some Very Cool metallic gold bugs the shape of ladybugs which, of course, I've also seen--the gold bugs were on my morning glory
- Inchworms (I think they are so cute!--the little green ones, not the big old honkers in the ground (earthworms) which I do have plenty of, meaning the soil is good)
- I'm sure there are more--I will add as I think of them
My most recent tenants--and, BOY, do I have an episode on the perils of becoming a landlord--reported seeing raccoons on the porch, where they'd put their trash. I worry about rabies with raccoons, but they are awfully cute.
Today I must go over to the cottage and keep working on making it look pretty after the emigration of my tenants--thank god. Never did a relationship that started out with so much promise end so badly. But I'm glad to have my cottage back, and though I need the money that rent would afford, those two ended up costing me money. I made not one red cent on them and am still dealing with that whole disaster. Another episode.
In the meantime, think about making your backyard a wildlife haven. We humans have taken away so much of their home turf--it's only fair that those of us who love animals help rectify that as much as we can! I HOPE to trap my field voles with live traps, but I'm told I'll need to take them some ten miles away to be sure they won't come back. Sigh. It's worth it.
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