Your Photos (2025)

This morning vs this afternoon


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Couple of wildlife sightings from last week - first a cute little bunny, and then a very interesting one - spotted a muskrat in the creek on the way home from the pub!
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It’s hard to see, but the brown thing in the middle of the ripples is the muskrat. I got a good look at it when it was sitting on the shore - it’s definitely a muskrat and not a beaver (their tails are different).
 
Herbaceous said:
It’s hard to see, but the brown thing in the middle of the ripples is the muskrat. I got a good look at it when it was sitting on the shore - it’s definitely a muskrat and not a beaver (their tails are different).
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Our house in Minnesota had an expansive natural walking area behind it, with a path that wound through open areas, an overgrown meadow, and woods. I used to walk our dog there twice a day off-leash and we both enjoyed it.

At the start of the nature area was a small pond, close enough that it really felt like it belonged to us. I would look out the back window or off the back deck and see something swimming in the water…something black…with a tail like a rat.

Didn’t really know what it was, but the neighbors clued me in that it was a muskrat and had become something of a neighborhood mascot of sorts, paddling along, day after day.

Anyway, one day, walking the dog off-leash (which was legal as long as you had voice command of the dog, and Molly was good about staying nearby and coming when called), and passing the pond…there was Molly, off like a shot toward the water.

So close to the house, no one else around, I didn’t get in much of a hurry to call her back, I just headed over to the pond, where she decided to go for a swim, something she’d do on occasion.

She was swimming back to the bank, only this time, she had something in her mouth…yep, she’d caught and killed the muskrat!

Every so often after that, someone would mention that they hadn’t see our little community critter splashing around, but I never confessed to what had happened.

That muskrat got its own back, though - Molly’d eaten quite a bit of it before I could wrestle her off it, and that big ingestion of fat gave her pancreatitis, so for the rest of her life, she was on a low-far diet and I couldn’t walk her off-leash any longer, in case she ate a squirrel or something.
 
TastyReuben said:
Our house in Minnesota had an expansive natural walking area behind it, with a path that wound through open areas, an overgrown meadow, and woods. I used to walk our dog there twice a day off-leash and we both enjoyed it.

At the start of the nature area was a small pond, close enough that it really felt like it belonged to us. I would look out the back window or off the back deck and see something swimming in the water…something black…with a tail like a rat.

Didn’t really know what it was, but the neighbors clued me in that it was a muskrat and had become something of a neighborhood mascot of sorts, paddling along, day after day.

Anyway, one day, walking the dog off-leash (which was legal as long as you had voice command of the dog, and Molly was good about staying nearby and coming when called), and passing the pond…there was Molly, off like a shot toward the water.

So close to the house, no one else around, I didn’t get in much of a hurry to call her back, I just headed over to the pond, where she decided to go for a swim, something she’d do on occasion.

She was swimming back to the bank, only this time, she had something in her mouth…yep, she’d caught and killed the muskrat!

Every so often after that, someone would mention that they hadn’t see our little community critter splashing around, but I never confessed to what had happened.

That muskrat got its own back, though - Molly’d eaten quite a bit of it before I could wrestle her off it, and that big ingestion of fat gave her pancreatitis, so for the rest of her life, she was on a low-far diet and I couldn’t walk her off-leash any longer, in case she ate a squirrel or something.
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Poor muskrat, and poor molly :ohmy:
 
badjak said:
I had to google a bit here. I was correct and I know it as a muskus rat. They are actively "hunted" in the Netherlands and Belgium due to the damage they do to the water protection works
In Belgium they are sometimes on the menu as "water rabbit"
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Yes on works damage. We've got a pond and the muskrats will burrow holes in it. Have to manage them or lose the pond.
 
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