What on earth is this creature?

Hey Dennis,
If you want groundhogs with tails I'll trap some and drop them off to you!
PQ

That's what I was thinking too! She's lucky she wasn't bitten!

If it had a little bare stubby tail, Bushy Tailed Wood Rat. (I have tons of these on my place)

If it had no tail, Mountain Beaver. I see these guys higher up on the mountain.

The little guys who look a lot like that and live in alpine areas are pikas. The bigger versions with a high-pitched whistle are marmots.

I'd a took it for a rat and shot it.

Looks like maybe a rat went all country when they first came over.
Nothing more than a hillbilly cousin to the sewer rat.

__________________
Having a deep emotional conversation with my quilted buddy..........

What a neat critter! I've never even heard of such a thing. It sounds like something made up that kids at camp send first time campers into the woods at night to find!

As for it letting her pick it up, we've had possums that have come up on the porch to steal catfood, and we literally had to sweep them off with a broom because they were too dumb to run away. Maybe they are like possums, intellectually speaking.

__________________
Melissa
Reformed hoyden. Please forgive me if I relapse.

My grandmother was born, raised, and has lived most of her life in the Oregon Coast Range (near Florence). She agreed with the mountain boomer/beaver identification (they called them mountain boomers, and I always wondered what they were talking about, since they were gone from our area by the time I was a kid). She said they made big holes all over, and horses would step in the holes and break their legs, so the farmers in her area had a bounty on them and pretty well eradicated them (though they might be coming back in by now).

She also has a cute story that my Grandfather's mother told her: Shortly after Granddad was born, they had a dog with pups, and a cat with kittens. Great-grandma would put the baby in his cradle on the porch in the shade while she was working outside, where she could keep an eye on him. The momma dog would go out hunting and bring back mountain boomers; one for the kittens, one for the puppies, and one for the baby, which she would lay in the cradle alongside him. Great-grandma really wasn't too thrilled about having a dead animal in her precious little baby boy's cradle, LOL! But I thought it was pretty neat that the momma dog was taking care of all the babies on the place!

Kathleen

looks like one of those elbedritschels a mythical animal in PA Dutch . . . The difficulties of catching an elbedritsche are dwelt upon in loving detail. Almost grudgingly the old men consent to the young man joining the hunt. The greenhorn is given a bag in which to catch one and taken far off . . and stationed behind a rock or tree while the old men separate—or so he is given to understand—to drive the elbedritsches toward him. There he is left literally holding the bag.

__________________
http://www.backyardtechnology.com/technofarming/

That is a cool story!

Cindyc.

I was wrong, I have another hog in the trap and it does have a tail. I should have remembered it because it's the only way to get them out of the trap when I try to turn them loose.
Dennis