remember the "beaver" that was living in my yard? well, it turned out he was a she, and she was a pregnant nutria. now there are six nutria--the mama and five little fuzzy puffballs that i would be absolutely in love with if i didn't know what they would grow up to be--living under our back deck. i turned in a report to my landlord on may 30th, and again today, so we'll see what happens with them. the landlord assured me that they would be humanely trapped and released, which i'm glad for. as much as i despise nutria, i don't like the idea of killing a mama anything and its babies.
because i'm a nerd, and because people in california reading this might not be familiar with nutria (i wasn't until i went to college in salem), i googled them. nutria...disgusting enormous rats...have their own website: http://www.nutria.com/. seriously. it turns out they aren't even supposed to be here in the first place. some dumbass fur trader imported them from south america to louisiana, where they were released "either intentionally or accidentally" into the swamp. then, apparently, a HURRICANE picked them all up and dispersed them around into mississippi and texas. since then (jj, you'll be interested in this part), they have reportedly caused "extensive damage to louisiana coastal wetlands." the website pretty much only talks about louisiana and it's neighbors, so i have no idea how they went from damaging the gulf coast to damaging my back yard. i did learn, however, that "the generic name [myocastor coypus] is derived from two greek words (mys, for mouse, and kastor, for beaver) that translate as mouse beaver." so i was right: there is a beaver living under my house!
5 comments:
I have heard similarly bad things about nutria. In fact, when I was in the south for one of my surveying stints, there were nutria recipes and rewards for nutria capture (not neccessarily at the time, but somewhere in their recent history). Evidently, they taste just like chicken...I can't provide anymore info on their effects to your backyard ecology, besides guessing, based on lots of known examples of other species, any introduced species is bound to harm a new environment. However, "harm" is a debatable word, and some think it's just part of the formation of new ecological dynamics (whether based on our ations or nature's gradual changes). And I think they're cute. Anyway, that's my two-cents...
How do you know that they taste like chicken? MJ, I think you better cook and eat one of the babies just to make sure...
OMG -- you do realize that I can never come visit you. Blame Jesse for the traumatic neutria visit my freshman year and all. Apparently, one of the real problems, is that there are no natural predators and so they just keep breeding and all (they are causing lots of damage in Lake Washington at the moment). We can never escape these things, can we?!
i'll be moving away from there next spring once the lease is up and we'll be buying a house. hopefully a nutria-free house! otis seems to think they must taste like chicken, too...he's always lunging after them and chasing them back under the house. though i can't tell if he wants to eat them or make friends. poor doggie. we need to get him another dog so he doesn't have to befriend the gross nutria.
Ahh!!! Don't let Otis eat the nutria...or cook one!! and they're not gross. I think I just am soft hearted...I picked up a little fledgling bird today on my way to my office and put it back near its tree..it was very cute. And Jenn, I think I was told they taste like chicken; it was probbaly just a gambit to get people to eat them. Evidently, they do not look very appealing (except to Otis).
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