FIBER /IBETHICUS. I 87 



TJie Musk rat as a FisJi-cater. 



That the Muskrat is not commonly considered a fish-eater is 

 evident from the absence of reference to such habit in the pubhshed 

 accounts of the animal. Robert Kennicott and Gov. DeWitt Clinton 

 are, so far as I have been able to ascertain, the only authors who 

 mention this trait. Kennicott says : " Excepting- in eating mollusks. 

 and occasionally a dead fish, I am not aware that this species departs 

 from a vegetable diet." '•' 



Gov. Clinton, writing in 1820 of the then newly built Erie Canal, 

 in New York, said : " In winter, when the water is frozen, muskrats 

 go under the ice and prey on the fish. They are very destructive to 

 trout, which is already in the canal." f 



At a meeting of the Biological Society of Washington, held in the 

 National Museum, December 14th, 1883, Mr. Henry W. Elliott 

 spoke of the " Appetite of the Muskrat !' He stated that in certain 

 parts of Ohio the Muskrat did great injury to Carp ponds, not only 

 by perforating the banks and dams and thus letting off the water, but 

 also by actually capturing and devouring the Carp, which is a sluggish 

 fish, often remaining motionless, half buried in the mud. In the dis- 

 cussion that followed, Dr. Mason Graham Ellzey said that from boy- 

 hood he had been familiar with the fact that the Muskrat sometimes 

 ate fish. In fact, he had seen Muskrats in the act of devourino- fish 

 that had recently been caught and left upon the bank. The President, 

 Dr. Charles A. White, narrated a similar experience. 



On the /th of February, 1884, I brought this subject to the notice 

 of the Linnsean Society of New York, and asked if any of the mem- 

 bers knew the Muskrat to be a fish-eater. Dr. Edgar A. Mearns 

 said that he had long been familiar with the fact, and that it was no 

 uncommon thing to see a Muskrat munching a dead fish upon the 

 borders of the salt marshes along the Hudson. He had shot them 



* Quadrupeds of Illinois Injurious and Beneficial to the Farmer, 1857, p. 106. 



f Letters on the Natural History and Internal Resources of the State of New York. By 



Hibernicus, 1822, p. 46. 



