What’s That Brown Critter Swimming in the Water?

∞ I’ve been seeing a lot of river rodents in the Black River recently. Are they beavers, muskrats or nutria? How can you tell when they are mostly submerged in the water and you can’t see the most obvious differences?

If you just see a brown head swimming somewhere off from you, call it what you want and dare anybody to prove you wrong.

The tail. None of us get lucky enough to see a beaver’s tail when it’s swimming, which would make identification easy. A nutria has a long skinny tail that has coarse fur and a muskrat has a long skinny, scaly tail. Still not very helpful.

Muskrats are smallest, less than 5 pounds full grown, then come nutria. Adult beavers are the biggest, 20-50 pounds. However juvenile nutria and beavers can be the same size as adult muskrats, so you are still confused.

When a beaver swims with its tail, it will flip the tail a few strokes and then rest, so when you are looking at the wake made by a swimming beaver (assuming you are close enough) you will see the V made by the nose and body and a pulsating wave behind the beaver–some ripples followed by smoothness–then ripples again as the tail is moved.

Muskrats use their tails to swim so there is a constant ripple like a swimming snake behind a muskrat. A nutria’s tail isn’t used for swimming so it just trails behind unmoving.

Most helpful, nutria generally have white fur around their snouts and bright orange teeth if you can see them head-on.

Beavers usually dive as soon as they see paddlers.

Right now in the spring, muskrats are actively foraging for leaves and roots and tend to allow paddlers to pass close by. They may dive and then pop up close to you as you paddle. I have seen several muskrats sitting on a sandbar at water’s edge. They will waddle along the edge as I pass by but they don’t attempt to escape or evade, they just watch me. Do I look edible to them?

Since Nature has made identification so difficult for swimming rodents I have decided to make my own classification. From now on, when I see a brown head in the water I will call it,

“The Elusive Musky Nutreaver”.

This will be added to my famous identification of all snakes, the “deadly copperheaded water rattlers.”

Remember, call out your identification first, dare anybody to prove you wrong and don’t back down if someone disagrees, because as you know, all your fellow paddlers are simpletons anyway.