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In the spring of 2018 my wife Becky and I went to Sibley State Park to take a course on how to add observations to the Minnesota Bee Atlas. This is a beautiful state park and is located north of Wilmar and Spicer. It was a sunny day and during our breaks we went outside and looked over the mostly frozen pond nearby. Several muskrat houses could be seen sticking out above the ice. It was so warm that we could see muskrats sunning themselves on their houses and exploring around the pond.
Here is one of the houses sticking out of the melting ice. A muskrat is seen on its house.
Two houses can be seen here with a brown muskrat on the top of the closest house
These two muskrats were hanging around a hole in the ice.
These pictures give you an idea of what muskrats look like.
The one on the right is wetter than the one on the left. It maybe just swam out of its house under the ice and came out of the hole here.
In the fall of 2020 I noticed several muskrats building a domed house in the middle of the back pond southeast of the larger overflow pond east of Fairfax. I had seen a muskrat swimming in the larger pond the year before and during the summer of 2020 I saw what looked like 2 muskrat houses around the edge of the smaller pond. I thought that they were building this new house in the center of the pond as the level of water was going down along the edge of the pond. The picture at the top in the banner shows 2 muskrats swimming to the house with stuff to add to the house.
The reeds between me and the house made this a little blurry but if you look closely you can see 3 muskrats on the left of the house.
This picture shows the area around the new house the muskrats are building. It was taken from the south shore of the small pond.
This is the old house along the edge of the pond.
I thought this was interesting in that the plastic tube was included by the muskrats in their construction.
Today (February 2, 2021), I went out to check on the muskrat house in the pond in Fairfax. I had listened to a podcast about beavers earlier in the day. It was interesting to hear that beaver, and I assume muskrat, houses have to breathe through the top so that the residents can breath in oxygen and exhale CO2. They showed on the top of a beaver house several areas where the snow was melted from the heat of this exchange of air due to the animals exhaling warm air. I wondered if it would be the same on the new house our muskrat family built. Below are a few pictures I took.
This was taken 2 weeks ago on January 19 and the house is completely covered with snow.
I took this picture today from a different angle. Almost no snow is on it.
The differences in the two pictures may be due to the sun shining on the darker soil and melting more of the snow. I looked at the two (it turned out 3) older houses (see below) and they all had much more snow on them. I assume they were abandoned so have no heat coming from animals within.
This was a bigger house today just north and east of the new house and was covered with snow.
Both of these houses (second behind and to the left) were also mostly covered with snow.
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