Happy Hour in Whitefish

Logger Bob Love, the real thing.

August, 6 -- Whitefish, Montana

It was our last day at Carl's cabin, because we were heading North to Alaska the next day.

We drove to Kalispell for supplies and to have a tire repaired,and then we pigged out on barbecue.

Food coma soon followed, and we headed home.

Carl had the foresight to save some of the meal for the ladies, who had been busy at the cabin, and this made our power-naps somehow excusable.

When we awoke the woods were rumbling. So we strolled over to watch Logger Bob sawing and munching piss firs with his machines.

Bob is the real thing. No lumbersexual wears pitch-stained pants, and smells like chain saw exhaust.

Carl hired Bob to thin the piss firs, "because they crowd out the larches and pines".

"They're as common as wood rats around here, and they stink like rats, too."

(Carl always abuses my favorite rodent in my presence.)

Yep, Piss firs. I hadn't heard of them either.

The colorful moniker comes from the subalpine fir's habit of releasing a stream of water when bored with a forester's auger. So says the Slang Dictionary. 

Break time in the pickup.

While we admired the machinery, Bob's dog Sparky hunted Montana's other native scoundrel, the bushy-tailed wood rat.  

Sparky knows where to find these handsome rodents, and how to flush them, and if he doesn't nail them on the run, he trees them and stands vigil till they come down and make a run for it. 

Our dogs Fred and Petey found Sparky to be a really neat guy, and joined him in the chase, but they just didn't get the waiting game under the tree.

Sparky stood vigil while
Petey and Fred wanted in.

Fred can't even catch a squirrel, and thinks the game ends when the squirrel goes up the tree.

So when Sparky treed a rat that afternoon our dogs drifted off and were soon looking wistfully into the cabin.

Before long it was happy hour, and a chance to chat with a real Montana logger.

We gathered on Carl's porch next to the beer cooler where Moose Drool and other brews greased the skids.

Soon we swapping stories about trees, timber, wood, land, and of course wildlife.

Old snags?  Bob knew of a big one used by bears as a hibernaculum.

I asked if he had ever seen a wolverine out here. 

I doubted he had, but I was wrong.

"I passed one on the shoulder of the road one morning.

"It had it's head up the butt-end of a road killed deer, and was within shooting range of any passing pickup. 

"So I walked it away from the road and called the game warden."

"The warden dragged the carcass up into the woods, and the wolverine survived a close call with civilization.

Salted into Bob's accounts was the name of Bud Moore.

Moore grew up in the Bitterroots, trapped and built cabins as a teenager, was a Marine during WW2, and worked for the Forest Service most of his life.

He was one of those rare individuals who "listened to the land and learned from it".

"Bud was like my brother, grandfather, father, mentor and best friend. It was like we'd known each other in previous lives, and reconnected.  We will again one day."
  

Moore was a toddler when writer Norman MacLean worked for the Forest Service, but their paths crossed decades later when MacLean needed a fact checker for his draft of A River Runs Through It.

In Bob's words . . .

"McLean didn't know Bud at the time, but since Bud knew the country and characters in the stories, he asked him to check the manuscript for facts.  In Bud's words, 'I took my red pencil to it and sent it back'.  The edits didn't go over well, but Maclean eventually agreed they were warranted."

"Bud was on the team that investigated the Mann Gulch fire, and was responsible for the Fire Fighter's standard safety rules, which are still in effect today."

"They are fashioned after the Marine Rules of Battle Conduct.  Bud had been in the Marines, and couldn't recall the rules to the letter, but he thought they'd be applicable to fire fighting."

"The team was meeting in DC, near some military facility.  Bud went out and found a Marine at a bus stop, and asked him to recite the rules.  He wrote them down, brought them back to the meeting, and they were adopted by the FS."

The Maclean-Moore relationship grew into one of mutual respect, and when Moore was writing The Lochsa Story he observed that "McLean took care of my inclination to put outdoor pursuits first, desk work last. Every time I dropped my pencil and looked at my fly rod, he would show up in some form or another."

I had one last question before Bob headed home.

"What's wrong with Sparky's paw?" (Sparky favored one paw. Was it a casualty of the chase?)

"Compound fracture", said Bob. "He broke his leg when he fell off a roof, trying to get deer fat I'd put up there for ravens.   

"Maybe I should have had it cut off. He wouldn't be in such pain, but he wouldn't be able to catch wood rats either." 

It was a happy hour I won't forget.

References
Cawelti, John.  www.press.uchicago.edu/books/maclean/maclean_cawelti.html
[an interesting excerpt about Maclean's analytical and critical compliment of a lecture Cawelti once gave at the University of Chicago -- from Cawelti's book, Norman Maclean: Of scholars, fishing, and the River]

Moore, Bud. 1996. The Lochsa Story, Land Ethics in the Bitterroot Mountains. Mountain Press Publishing Company, Missoula, Montana

Maclean, Norman. 1992. Young Men and Fire. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

From homely juvenile to young prince

Bushy-tailed wood rats aren't born beauties. 

In youth they look like any other rat, especially with that ratty tail and brownish-gray coat.

A few months later however, their tails gets hairy and their coats acquire buffy highlights.

This animal of the subspecies Neotoma cinerea pulla was camera trapped last summer in a talus slide in the central Sierra Nevada, and I suspect it is a young adult.

In one night we got 54 photos of several woodrats, and there were three age classes.

Unfortunately, a large bulky rat, presumably a male, was the most timid subject, and all images of it were partial pictures.

The subspecies occidentalis seen in the previous post is more silvery and regal in coloration than these woodrats of the Sierra Nevada.

They are all good-lookers though.

A dirty filthy but princely rat

A bushy-tailed pack rat (Neotoma cinerea) in a pile of slabs in an abandoned saw mill (Flathead County, Montana).

They may be the best looking rats in North America, but it doesn't matter. In western Montana bushy-tailed wood rats are regarded as dirty filthy rats.

"How could such a princely rodent alienate so many?" I ask.

"Because they stink, they make a mess, and they crap and piss all over the place", Carl answers.

Carl's photos show the ugly truth happening on his front porch.

Bushy-tail caught during intimate moment
 of fecal assessment. (Photo by Carl Hansen)

A poop-obsessed pack rat seems to nuzzle and whisper tenderly to its fecal pellet.

Bushy-tail aids in the delivery of a fecal pellet
(photo by Carl Hansen)

And here you see the rat aiding the passage of a fecal pellet with the tender care of a midwife delivering a babe.

This may be an example of coprophagy -- recycling nutrients in the fermentation products of the caecum, but never mind.

Even David Attenborough's soothing zoological wonderment at such phenomena would not change the minds of the pack rat's detractors.

A pack rat midden in an abandoned cabin.

The beautiful furry rat has other unsavory habits -- like moving into human habitations and decorating with foliage, twigs, and anything else that strikes its fancy.

The middens become their toilets, glued together with urine and feces, and in due course the reeking mass solidifies, crystallizes, and becomes amberat, which acquires a resinous bouquet, and in fact was once mistaken for Native American peanut brittle by a gang of starving 49ers.

The pack rat however has redeeming qualities beyond its good looks and silky Chinchilla coat.

Scientists now know that this dirty filthy rat is an environmental historian.

Countless generations of pack rats have been contributing to some middens for at least the past 25,000 years.

These paleo-middens are monumental edifices hidden in rocky canyons and caves, and they contain a treasure trove on data on environmental change and its consequences on body size as an adaptation to heat dissipation.

The biologists quickly realized that fecal pellets in paleo-middens were not all the same size, and used Carbon 14 dating to assign ages to feces and associated plant parts.

They validated the relationship between pellet size and body size by examining several species of wood rats, and they did other tests to verify their findings.

Guess what?  Pack rats that lived 20,000 years ago in the shadows of the glaciers were impressive hulks.  They are estimated to have weighed as much as 450 grams (roughly a pound).

They grew smaller as temperatures increased after the last glacial, and by the mid-Holocene, about 6000 years ago they were 20% smaller than their ancestors.

It paid to be big, and even today the bushy-tailed wood rat is the largest living species of its clan.

The old pack rat may have a few nasty habits, but it's still a princely looking rodent.   

"Where is it? The viagra doesn't seem to be working".

Reference

Smith, F.A., J.L. Betancourt, and J.H. Brown. 1995. Evolution of body size in the woodrat over the past 25,000 years of climate change. Science, Vol. 270:2012-2014. 

Denizens of Deadman

A chickaree aka  Douglas squirrel  came first. 

Well, Jake volunteered to join me, so I didn't have to climb Deadman alone.

Normally Fred would have been there too, but the redhead took him home so I could wrap up the workshop and pack up without distractions.

The cameras had been out for only 48 hours and memory should have led me to them like a bird dog, but even with the GPS we bumbled about looking for the first set.

Of course we checked the pictures as soon as we found it  -- the moment of truth had arrived.

The first visitor to the set, a runty chickaree and doubtless young of the year, left one picture the morning after we set the camera.

We clicked forward . . . blank images . . . and hallelujah!

There was bushy-tail poised on a rock and showing its diagnostically furry bicolored caudal appendage.

The bushy-tailed wood rat (Neotoma cinerea).

It had visited the second night and like the chickaree had left but one photo.

We resumed our climb to the top of the scree and found the second camera just before noon.

A pinon mouse had visited the first night.

Judging from those big ears  it was a Pinon mouse (Peromyscus truei)

And Little Chief Hare made a cameo appearance the next day.

Deadman had paid off, and we ate lunch with satisfaction beside the set.

Our mountaineering exercise had proved that habitat is often key to finding one's target species.

Both pika and bushy-tailed wood rat evolved in the footprints of glaciers.

For two years I had sought the wood rat among boulders and outcrops only a half mile from here.

It should have been there, but only after ploughing the literature did I learn that talus was also one of bushy-tail's favored habitats.

Our routes in and around Deadman Scree.

We explored the rest of the scree into early afternoon, and recorded waypoints for a big red fir, and a new colony of mountain beaver.

Then we drove back to camp to show off the pictures.

Still looking for bushy-tail

Set 270 in the granite recess 

 It looked like a good place for a bushy-tailed wood rat -- a pile of lodgepole pine cones in a sheltered recess under granite boulders at the top of a 60 foot outcrop. 

I was in red fir forest at an elevation of 6000 feet. They should be around.

Plus, there were rat pellets in there too. At least that's what they looked like.

So even though I had camera trapped the site last year, I wasn't convinced I'd seen everything it might offer -- like bushy-tail.

So I squeezed into the space one more time and made set # 270 in mid-June.

There was fresh bear scat only about 30 feet away.

Maybe the bear would poke its nose into the recess as happened a couple years ago.

But neither bears nor wood rats made a showing.

All I got were pictures of deer mice and shadow chipmunks. 

The search must continue. 

A bushy-tailed wood rat's tale

[Pretty damn cute for a rat, wouldn't you say?]

As I am sure you all know, I have a fondness for our native wood rats.

And for the last year have been on a dogged if desultory quest to camera trap the Prince of Wood Rats -- Neotoma cinerea -- the bushy-tailed one.

To date I have failed, which is more than a little embarrassing.

As a reasonably fit though aging mammalogist I should be able to nail this species with my cams -- and with little effort. 

Well, Saturday night I got a call from the daughter of a childhood friend.

She lives in Utah at 6000', near a reservoir, and something was making a nest in her garage.

The animal control officer told her the intruder was probably a muskrat. 

[Okay, it's not bushy by squirrel standards, but it's a lovely tail for a rat.]

Ahem!

I begged to differ, predicted the identity of the intruder, and advised her on baits.

They caught the little bugger and here's the story and photos, which I am grateful for permission to use and quote. 

"Dear Dad, Mom, and Dr. Wemmer,
Thank you so much for your advice. Our Bushy Tailed Wood Rat ( if that is indeed what he is) was trapped a few minutes before midnight last night using your suggestion, Dr Wemmer, of oatmeal and peanut butter.  Unfortunately, we didn't have any sunflower seeds, but the rat didn't seem to mind.  What a cute creature. He looks very much like a humongous hamster with a fluffy tail.  I didn't think to hold a ruler up to the cage, but the body length was a good 6 inches or so, and the tail about the same length. I have attached the photographs we took that turned out.  Unfortunately we have none without the cage, since this animal was just amazingly fast.  Much faster than my camera.

The kids named it Bob in honor of one of Sandra Boyton's songs. Turns out they were right about him being a male.  He certainly has boy parts.

Since we also weren't up to traipsing around a strange wood in the dark in order to release him, Bob camped out in the cage in the garage overnight.  He was a well cared for rat, with the cat's water bottle from their traveling kennel hooked to the cage and the lid full of peanut butter and oatmeal.  Wayne even wrapped the cage in old towels since the kids were concerned Bob would get too cold in the garage overnight. They didn't want to find a body in the morning instead of a healthy rodent.  However, Bob survived his night of captivity just fine. And while he didn't like us picking up the cage to transport him, he was quite content with his oatmeal peanut butter.      

Once we had the ok from the Sheriff's office today, Wayne took Bob down to the nature preserve suggested by our local animal control officer and released him. Apparently bushy tailed wood rats are considered a protected species in this area, so we had absolutely no trouble getting the approval to release him back into the wild.  He took off like a rocket once he realized the cage was open. The preserve is almost 9 miles away, so we are hoping that we took Bob far enough for him to be unable to find his way back to our garage.  Thankfully, he didn't do any damage to anything in the garage, and while it wasn't fun to clean up after him it was a pretty easy task.  We just have our fingers crossed that the wildlife stays down at the reservoir from now on, where we can watch them in their own habitat.

Thank you again Mom and Dad for suggesting Dr. Wemmer as a source of information.  And thank you so very much, Dr Wemmer, for helping us catch our visitor in as humane a fashion as possible.  We greatly appreciate your advice and willingness to coach us.  Thank you again.

-Erika