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The Okefenokee Swamp

Round-tailed Muskrats in the Okefenokee region

In May 2012 I stopped in southern Georgia for a night on my way to a bat catching blitz in Florida.

Round-tailed Muskrats are a species which has generated a fair bit of correspondence on the mammalwatching blog over the past couple of years and I know of no one who has seen one other than Vladimir Dinets, who reported seeing a couple at Grand Bay near Moody Air Force Bay in south-east Georgia. So when I decided to go to Florida I thought I'd go to Georgia a day early and meet up with John Fox who was also very keen to see this species.

I did a bit of research before I got there. Vladimir had seeing rats at Grand Bay: he saw one swimming and another sitting on top of a nest. Greg Nelms, a biologist at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, knew a fair bit about the animals in Grand Bay. He said they were rare there, hard to see and very difficult to trap (plus they are endangered so I'd have needed a permit). The only area of the swamp where he had seen nests was in the prarie areas (areas of floating vegetation), to the north of the observation tower. A map is here (the "neotema" label should say "neofiber"!). And to get out there I'd need a canoe. There was nowhere to hire one that I could find, and I didn't think American Airlines would let me check one in from New York...

So I met up with John Fox there in the late afternoon and we walked the boardwalk. Its a lovely spot but there was no sign of a muskrat nor any nests. I did see an Eastern Fox Squirrel in the car park.

From there we headed to nearby Banks Lake Outpost where we could rent a canoe, even if we could only take it out on the lake behind the outpost. The friendly manager said biologists had never found rats on the lake, but they had said they might be there. Needless to say we didn't find one in an hour's paddling at dusk but saw something that might have been a nest, but probably wasn't. The rats nest on floating clumps of vegetation and Greg Nelms sent me this photo of a nest in the Okefenokee Swamp. The nests are quite large - some people can spot them from the air during surveys.

Round-tailed Muskrat Nest (courtesy of Greg Nelms).

So no muskrats, but it was fun to look and paddle among the Alligators.

Muskrat habitat, Okefenokee Swamp

The next morning I took a 3 hour canoe trip through the Okefenokee at dawn. It was beautiful. Heaps of Alligators, plus a Fox Squirrel and a White-tailed Deer along the swamp drive. Marsh Rabbits are reported from here too though I didn't see one. I'd spoken to a biologist at the swamp who said that the rats were sparse but she'd seen nests occassionally out in the prarie areas. I'd left it too late to get a permit to canoe camp though. Perhaps if I'd had have done that, a paddle in the dark through some of the right habitat might have been productive (its possible to hire canoes for day or longer trips from the park HQ east of Folkston.