one of its original Amerindian names, for it is not a rat in the 

 pure sense but a large vole, belonging to the Cricetid as opposed 

 to the Old World Murid group of the rodents. It is to be found 

 almost all over this continent in suitable localities, but nowhere 

 is it so abundant as in this province. It is a large rat-shaped 

 creature with very small ears, enormous webbed hind feet, and 

 a naked, scaly tail that is compressed from side to side. In over- 

 all length it may grow to two feet. Its skin is completely water- 

 proof and bears a thick, soft underfur and a long, glistening 

 overcoat of firmer hairs. It is of various rich shades of brown, 

 dark along the midback, lighter to reddish on the flanks, and 

 much lighter below, even to having a white throat in some 

 races. It gives off a rather pleasant musky, aromatic odor; but 

 it is not what one might call a friendly beast, either to man or 

 Us own kind, and it can give a most destructive bite. It constructs 

 feednig dumps or lodges on open water or among grasses, to 

 which it hauls vegetation to be eaten. These are individually 

 owned projects. 



Muskrats either build lodges in the open or undertake large 

 constructions in banks for winter use, wherein up to a dozen 

 individuals may reside and in out-chambers of which the young 

 are produced. The lodges are made of countless little oblong 

 rolls of vegetable fibers, grass stems, and so forth, all neatly 

 rolled by the animals. Muskrats have several litters of up to 

 nine or ten young per season after only a thirty-day gestation 

 period, and the young are weaned in a month. 



Half a century ago a man in Oregon brought to this country 

 from the La Plata area of South America another animal that 

 looks superficially like a muskrat multiplied in bulk by about 

 ten. Actually it is a member of an entirely different group of the 

 rodents — that of the porcupines, as opposed to that of either the 

 rats or the squirrels, to which latter a third animal of similar 

 habits, the Beaver, belongs. Its name is the Coypu, that Myo- 

 potamus coypu mentioned earlier, the fur of which is known as 

 nutria. This animal did very well in the northwest but promptly 

 "escaped" and somehow managed to get great distances over the 

 continent, every now and then cropping up in a new locality — 

 much to the surprise of local folk who either had never seen 

 such a "rat," or mistook it for a beaver, or thought that their local 

 muskrats had suddenly taken to breeding giants. At first there 

 was considerable agitation as to whether this introduced animal 

 was going to oust some members of the indigenous fauna, but 

 it seems that the creature has settled down comfortably in a 

 natural niche that was actually empty: and this may well have 

 been that left by the then fast-vanishing Beaver. The Coypu did 

 not disturb the muskrats but lived alongside them, keeping in its 

 own little ecological zone, feeding on coarser vegetation, and 

 breeding happily. This animal has been so successfully introduced 

 to the Mississippi Delta that there is some apprehension there as 

 to the future of fur-trapping and even the balance of the natural 

 economv. 



EMPTY SHELLS 



As you drive about this delta or boat about its rivers and bayous, 

 you will hardly ever be out of sight of either great piles of white 

 stufT or of boats laden with it. These are shells — hundreds of 

 millions of tons of the empty "houses" of bivalve shellfish. The 

 roads are made of them, they litter and permeate the soil of the 

 fields, they are piled up everywhere by both man and nature; 

 they come pouring out of vast factories where their living 

 contents, mostly in the form of oysters, are canned; and they 

 come by the endless truckload from the oyster counters of New 



Orleans and every other town, hamlet, and homestead. They are 

 of two principal kinds, which may be loosely called oysters and 

 clams, both of which are bivalves or two-shelled moUusks. 



The clams are of numerous species and are found from the 

 deeper waters of the ocean to the high-tide mark, as well as in 

 the salt and brackish lakes, and even in some fresh-water lakes 

 and rivers. They are all of nondescript outline, either almost 

 round or almost rectangular or oblong; they are all rather thick 

 and are white, but are usually covered externally with a thin 

 brownish skin of chitinous material related to the material of 

 our fingernails. During life they are all busily engaged in 



Muskrats are semiaquatic voles, unique to this continent: 

 their pelts form the basis of the modern fur trade. They are 

 rather ingenious, digging extensive tunnels, draining ponds, 

 and constructing lodges. 



extracting calcium carbonate out of the waters and converting it 

 into their shells. Then they die, and all this material goes into 

 the sediments at the bottom of the water, since their "dead" 

 shells descend thereinto. This has a tremendous influence on the 

 kinds of rocks that are eventually made out of these sediments. 



Along the coast the oysters predominate, as they also do in 

 many salt-water lagoons and ponds. Oysters grow all together, 

 the young settling on the old and on dead shells and growing 

 there until, under normal conditions, they usually form vast 

 reefs. Others happen to fasten to small inanimate things when 

 very young and grow isolated and ready for the table, as one 

 might say. Today man has practically taken over the life of the 

 oyster of this coast and has developed an enormous industry 

 therefrom, but he is sensibly putting the shells back where 

 nature intended them to end up. He is thereby encouraging little 

 oysters and also building the land in a manner commensurate 

 with the current geological trend. 



The life of the oysters is by no means banal, and their part in 

 our history is almost glamorous. They have been eaten, and in 

 the vastest quantities, by all coast-dwelling peoples wherever 

 they have been found since palaeolithic times. Miniature moun- 

 tains formed of their shells stretch for miles in Denmark and 

 other countries where our stone-age ancestors pitched them out 



