{"id":18864,"date":"2016-10-26T13:48:34","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T20:48:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=18864"},"modified":"2016-10-26T13:48:34","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T20:48:34","slug":"muskrat-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=18864","title":{"rendered":"Muskrat food"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Last Saturday, I spoke\u00a0at a symposium and showed many portraits of local creatures. I noted that the muskrat, the smallest of our three semi-aquatic mammals, is often unjustly maligned. It is not actually a rat, but an aquatic vole, and substantially a vegetarian that feeds on aquatic weed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I did a bit of digging to see if I could discover why this little creature gets\u00a0demonized. Apart from the misconception that it is a\u00a0rat, it seems that farmers don’t like that it\u00a0burrows into pond banks and dock owners don’t like that it gnaws on some materials used for floatation. These rather narrow concerns\u00a0don’t impress\u00a0me. I like muskrats.<\/p>\n

A muskrat swims back to its den with a mouthful of aquatic weed. You go, muskrat!
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Last Saturday, I spoke\u00a0at a symposium and showed many portraits of local creatures. I noted that the muskrat, the smallest of our three semi-aquatic mammals, is often unjustly maligned. It is not actually a rat, but an aquatic vole, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mammals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18864"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18900,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18864\/revisions\/18900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}