Pack Rat

 Over the past couple of years, with these posts, I have been introducing you to the animals that share their land with us here. Naturally I started with the largest, the most dramatic, the most beautiful, the bobcats, the coyotes, the Javelinas, the black-tailed deer, the Cooper's hawks, the Harris's hawks, the western diamond-backed rattlesnakes, the gila monsters, the Mexican long-tongued bats, the desert blond tarantulas, the solifuge, the Costa's hummingbirds, the Anna's hummingbirds, the broad-billed hummingbirds. After a list like that it might seem like I am now down to  the dregs, but in fact maybe I am down to the most extraordinary of them all. I am talking about the pack rat (Neotoma albigula).

 He's really quite handsome, nice rounded ears, shiny black eye, furry tail, no narrow ratty face. And if you see him move, he has a wonderful agility and can go anywhere, climb anything. But notice that this photo is taken while he is imprisoned, which he richly deserves. You see, he can't resist setting up his lodging in your garage, and once he is in your garage he can't resist moving into the engine  compartment of your car. What he does then is get into the spaghetti of crucial wires behind the dashboard and cut and trim and rearrange them to make a comfortable nest, in the act costing you several thousand dollars to get them back the way they are supposed to be. Just say the word pack rat to anyone in Tucson and you immediately get stories of the horrors they have caused, and the revenges that are planned.

When we were moving in, and the previous owner was moving out, he gave me some tips about the pack rats. First of all he told me he was leaving me a HAVAHART trap, which he had used to catch the pack rats. Originally he would take them a mile away and release them. But almost immediately, its place in the garage would be taken by a new one. So finally he wised up and brushed some blue paint onto the back of the next one, and sure enough they were all returning to the garage almost before he could get back himself. It turns out pack rats have a fanatic loyalty to their home, and a sure sense of geography, so he learned to take them much farther away.

Garages usually have enough junk piled in them to give the pack rat lots of room to hide under, but out in the desert where they make their natural homes you see an area four or five feet wide made up of dozens of pads of cacti gathered together with tunnels running under them. The owner of the nest keeps it up, refurbishing it when it needs more bits of cacti (usually cholla) , and if something happens to the owner, another pack rat comes in and takes over. And it is here that you learn what an amazing creature this is. Scientists have carefully examined the disintegrating material at the lowest level of the nest and have found, in some cases, traces of pollen of plants that no longer grow where the nest is, plants that grew there when the climate was very different, material that can be traced back as much as forty-thousand years, which is how long that particular nest has been continuously occupied!

(End of part one of "Pack Rats")