muskrat

Idaho's air-dropped beavers, muskrat pens and ear-tagged marten

In 1948, game warden and pilot Elmo Heter executed a plan years in the making to reintroduce beavers into the mountainous wilds of Idaho. The project gained international fame in 2015, when a local historian discovered lost footage of the program. As seen in the video, the reintroduction efforts didn’t stop at parachuting beavers.

Muskrats: A canary for the wetlands coal mine?

The Wildlife Ecology Institute has recently announced new research being conducted to dive into the ‘rat’s potential role as an indicator species for wetland quality in the Great Lakes Basin. Researchers are reviewing multiple sources pertaining to muskrat population data, such as state trapper reports and counts of muskrat huts, and comparing those data sets with that of wetland quality, and additional sensitive wetland-wildlife species.