Oh rats: rodents spotted near lake

DAVE KIM / senior photographer Newman Lake muskrat

Any students who are in the habit of taking a moonlit stroll, or perhaps a drunken stumble, around JMU's Newman Lake at night might want to consider an alternative route in the future — if they are afraid of rodents, that is. Some quite sizable specimens have been turning up almost every night between the banks of the lake and Greek Row.

"They look like regular, large, brown sewer rats," said junior Jennifer Kies, who lives in the Delta Delta Delta sorority house adjacent to Newman Lake. The small hill behind her house has become a nocturnal playground for the animals, which she said were "the size of small dogs."

Sophomore Gina Santucci, who lives with Kies, described the animals as "huge and hairy," with long, hard tails. "They're not scared of people at all," she said. "You could walk right by them and they wouldn't even move."

Kies said three or four of them stroll around her backyard on a typical night. There were as many as nine of the animals in the yard at one time, she said, when a friend of hers saw a mother and eight babies.

Kies and her housemates said they are upset because they feel like they can't enjoy their backyard because of the animals. They said they also are worried about health risks. "From what I know about rats, they're not exactly the safest creatures to have wandering around," Kies said.

Fed up with the animals, Kies and her housemates contacted the Office of Residence Life in November. ORL sent Ron Jennings, director of Pest Management, to investigate the situation.

"I looked around the area … it was just muskrats," Jennings said. He said he saw no reason to exterminate what he called "timid creatures."

He said, "They pose no threat to humans at all and provide us with the viable service of controlling aquatic vegetation. It would be like going out to kill all the rabbits that are hopping around out there because you didn't like how they looked."

While rats are notorious for spreading disease, muskrats do not share this quality, Jennings said.

"Rats cohabitate with humans and feed off our debris," which increases the likelihood of disease transfer, he said. Muskrats, on the other hand, pose no such risk. In fact, many people hunt and trap them for food, Jennings said. Recipes for muskrat dishes such as "muskrat casserole" can even be found online at Web sites like the Everything Muskrat recipe page (my.net-link.net/~vaneselk/muskrat/recipes.htm).

There are several factors that could have caused the increase in the local muskrat population, according to Jennings. One is the heavy rainfall of last spring, which gave rise to ample vegetation for infant muskrats to feed on.

Since that time, a steady lack of rain has caused many of the animals to migrate to Newman Lake, Jennings said. Water provides muskrats with food and a safe haven, so the animals nearly always live in nearby burrows. As water levels drop, their burrows become increasingly distant from water, leaving them more exposed to predators as they travel from burrow to water in search of food. So to protect themselves, muskrats migrate closer to water, Jennings said. In this case, the muskrats chose the waters of Newman Lake.

An end to the current drought, however, could mean the end of the muskrats, Jennings said. He said he expects many of them to disperse from Newman Lake into other bodies of water as water levels rise.

Meanwhile, residents who must deal with the muskrats on a daily basis are not happy. "It's been a problem all year and nobody wants to do anything about it," Kies said. "I don't know what else we can do."

Despite protest, the muskrats at Newman Lake aren't going anywhere soon. "There have always been muskrats in Newman Lake and there always will be," Jennings said. In fact, the local population could be higher this fall because of the year's warm winter, he said.