Revenge of the Kangaroo Rat, guest blog by Chris Laning
As I’ve mentioned in previous guest columns, as a college student I volunteered as part of the staff of the campus museum. The professor who ran it was a zoologist, and anyone who volunteered there picked up a fair amount of knowledge about small furry animals just by hanging around. We also had the opportunity to go along on collecting trips, and there was often one scheduled for the week of spring vacation.
One year a couple of dozen of us piled into the college vans and took off for a week in western Oklahoma to visit one of the prof’s former students. The Black Mesa area in the Oklahoma “panhandle” is an interesting place to study small animals because it’s a meeting point between outliers of the Rocky Mountains and the shortgrass prairie.
There are also abundant dinosaur bones in the area.
Another lure was some species of bats we hadn’t seen. Besides all our old friends from Indiana we had the possibility of seeing Mexican free- tailed bats and two types of long-eared bats (Plecotus and Antrozous).
We did catch some of these in the mist nets we set up. The long-eared bats were especially admired: their ears really are amazingly big and delicate.*.
What I found particularly charming is that when long-eared bats are asleep, those large, pleated ears curl up and lie flat along the sides of the bat’s head, looking rather like a pair of ram’s horns. These bats also tend to wrap their wings over their ears when sleeping, which is pretty darn cute too.
Besides the bats, there were lots of other small animals we didn’t see back home: deer mice, pocket mice, gophers, packrats and so forth. But the most intriguing were the kangaroo rats.** Kangaroo rats are rodents, but only very distantly related to house rats. They have highly developed hind legs and hop like kangaroos, hence the name.
They also have very large furred pouches on the outsides of their cheeks and an efficient metabolism that enables them to get along with almost no water to drink.
Kangaroo rats come out only at night and usually don’t wander into traps. So we did a certain amount of cruising the back roads: that part of the state has unimproved dirt roads every mile or so, marking off the edges of surveyed sections.
The way you catch kangaroo rats is to drive v-e-e-e-e-ry slowly along these dirt roads with your headlights set on high beams, and watch for kangaroo rats hopping across in front of you. This sounds improbable, but we actually did see quite a few of them this way, at least eight or ten in an evening.
Actually capturing kangaroo rats once you see them is a bigger challenge. They move very fast for a small animal, almost faster than you can run, and are masters of evasive hopping, zigzagging and ducking behind bushes unpredictably. You need to be quick on your feet with a flashlight in one hand and a long-handled butterfly net in the other, and results are still not guaranteed. They are sand-colored and you often don’t see them till they move, so they have a head start on you.
So there we were, five or six of us squeezed into a car with flashlights and butterfly nets handy. We’d drive along, spot a kangaroo rat, the car would stop and we would all pile out and run after it, trying not to bash each other with the butterfly nets meanwhile. The Keystone Kops had nothing on us.
After few tries, some successful but most not, we decided that having to take the time to open the car doors and get out was slowing us down too much. So a couple of the guys volunteered to ride on the hood of the car so they could simply take off after any kangaroo rat we saw.
They sat on either side of the hood like gargoyles with their knees drawn up and their butterfly nets propped up next to them. The visibility for the driver wasn’t good, but the car was just creeping along. We were giggling because it looked so ridiculous.
A kangaroo rat popped up and the driver hit the brakes, and before they had a chance to jump, both guys found themselves sliding off the hood, landing in a heap and with one catching the other’s head in his butterfly net. They untangled themselves and got up, but by this time we were all laughing so hard that pursuit was useless. We tried another time or two, but gave up and went back to the piling-out-of- the car method.
We were staying in an old farmhouse that night, and since there were only two girls, we got the floor in the back bedroom to ourselves while the guys laid out mattresses all over the living room. We also got the animal cages, since we had more floor space. We’d brought along several of the bat cages for the smaller animals, but since we weren’t dealing with bats, we tried to put something heavy like a book on top to prevent anything pushing its way out through the slit in the rubber top.
In the middle of the night I woke up. I was sleeping on my stomach, and something was going hippedy-hip, hop, hippedy-hip, hop, up the back of my leg. I poked Deb sleeping next to me, we both sat up, and proceeded to re-enact the Keystone Kops routine with two of us trying to catch a kangaroo rat in a dark bedroom. A couple of the guys heard the commotion and came to help; we eventually cornered it and put it back in the cage with a heavier lid.
A few days later we got back to campus and were telling this story; I’d just barely started when one of the guys who had been with us on the trip said, “Oh, you mean the time the kangaroo rat tried to climb into bed with you? Smart rat!”
I blushed.
* * *
*photo here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/madridminer/3777280926/. Photo by Michael Roedel.
**A nice article about them here: http://www.birdandhike.com/Wildlife/Mamm/06Rod/04_Het/Dipodo_mer/_Dip_mer.htm
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.