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hairless. While the beaver’s tail is rounded and relatively short, very wide, and flattened top to bottom, the muskrat’s is long, quite slender, and flattened from side to side.
    The muskrat is also far smaller than the beaver. An adult varies from a foot and a half to a little over two feet long from nose to tip of tail. This total length is deceptive, however, for the long tail consumes nearly 40 percent of it; as a result, adult muskrats weigh only two to four pounds.
    Aside from their fondness for water, muskrats lead very different lives from beavers. For one thing, the muskrat’s habitat requirements are far less rigid than those of the beaver. Since they don’t construct dams, muskrats have no need of suitable dam sites, or for materials for constructing dams. They need very little in the way of water; anything from a huge lake or river to a drainage ditch or farm pond suits this notably unfussy rodent. In fact, muskrats frequently utilize beaver ponds for their habitat, and the two species seem to coexist quite peaceably.
    Muskrats also eat a much wider variety of foods than beavers. Whereas beavers are exclusively vegetarian, muskrats feed extensively on freshwater mussels, frogs, crayfish, and similar aquatic creatures whenever these are available. Now and then they even manage to catch a slow or unwary fish. However, their main diet is plant material; cattails (both the shoots and tubers), water lilies, duckweed, pickerel weed, assorted other pond weeds, bulrushes, sweet flag, and a variety of reeds and sedges are prime muskrat food.
    Nor is the muskrat constrained by the need for the inner bark of trees that so often forces the beaver to abandon a colony denuded of surrounding trees and brush. No doubt the muskrat’s great adaptability in matters of food and habitat accounts for its nearly ubiquitous presence throughout most of North America, from the subarctic to the Gulf of Mexico.
    Often the presence of beavers can be detected by gnawed pieces of wood that have floated far downstream from a colony. The first signs of the muskrat’s presence are likely to be a bit more subtle. These frequently take the form of cut pieces of cattails and other aquatic plants, floating about or lodged on the shoreline, and these are easily overlooked except by the careful observer. Far more obvious is the sight of some aquatic greenery mysteriously moving across the surface of the water. In the latter case, closer inspection reveals that it’s a sort of wildlife version of Birnam Wood coming to high Dunsinane—a muskrat, almost totally submerged, propelling a bunch of cut vegetation to a preferred feeding site.
    These favorite feeding spots vary widely. They may be flat rocks, logs, stumps, matted vegetation, or a composite of trampled mud and reeds. Often a heap of discarded mussel shells or the remains of a number of crayfish announce the location as a choice dining spot for the resident muskrat.
    Not only are muskrats more flexible than beavers in regard to food and habitat, but they’re also less choosy about living quarters. A beaver is compulsive about building a lodge, and digs a tunnel into a bank only as a last resort in situations where constructing a dam or lodge is totally impractical. Even in a large body of water with an outlet that beavers can’t possibly dam, the big rodents will fabricate a lodge near shore, provided the shoreline doesn’t drop off too abruptly or isn’t excessively rocky. A muskrat, on the other hand, usually lives in a burrow by preference, but is perfectly at ease building a house in marshes where there are no convenient banks steep enough for burrowing.
    A muskrat burrow can be quite long—up to fifteen feet—angling up and back from just below the surface of the water. With a larger living chamber at the end, and several escape tunnels, the whole affair can be fairly elaborate. Although muskrats are generally very beneficial, their tunneling proclivities sometimes cause damage