I don’t cotton to no rats

[BillMcGighan]

Seeing a rat in broad daylight is not something I’ve personally seen but a few times.
My wife and I were on the edge of a salt marsh and that seemed to be a haven for Hispid Cotton Rats (Sigmodon hispidus).

I’ve seen them at night and under artificial cover but was surprised to see them running around like rabbits or conies in daylight.










Even the kids were out.







Note to our good friends just starting with English:
“Don’t cotton to” is a southern U.S. slang that means to not like.
(Ok, ok, it’s tough to do rat humor in any language!)

[Tamara D. McConnell]

They are cute, Bill.

[BillMcGighan]

They actually are pretty cute even with naked tales like black rats and gray rats.

[VICtort]

Bill,

we have the same (?) species here in Arizona. I was amazed to encounter them when viewing a friends bird feeder, looking for a Lewis's woodpecker. I never saw the bird, but he was surprised when I told him I was viewing cotton rats, whom were taking the spilled grain along with the mourning doves. These rats apparently are strictly diurnal, a real surprise to me. My buddy traps some of them, and reports them at high numbers this year. He freezes the carcasses for a minimum of 90 days
and feeds them to captive snakes and sometimes to my indigos. I commonly see the rats running across our rural roads in broad day light.

I recently viewed a group of coyotes pursuing a jack rabbit. Two were hot on the hares trail, and the 3rd was trotting along with a cotton rat in its jaws. I think they support a lot of predators around here.

Last year I grew cantaloupes, and just as I was ready to harvest, something drilled a neat 2"d hole in them and emptied them of seeds. I set a trap and caught cotton rats, and the garden depredations stopped.

Good photos, they can be quite wary.

Vic

[BillMcGighan]

Lot's of interesting stuff, Vic.

I chuckled at

Last year I grew cantaloupes, and just as I was ready to harvest, something drilled a neat 2"d hole in them and emptied them of seeds. I set a trap and caught cotton rats, and the garden depredations stopped.

Only because we could empathize when we went through a similar bout with a burst of voles and bulb flowers!

[chrish]

Hispid Cotton Rats are diurnal and I frequently see them out in the day. I have done quite a bit of live trapping of rodents and we often caught hispidus in the middle of the day. We used to have to check our traps twice a day.....at dawn for the nocturnal species and then again in the afternoon to get all the S. hispidus out.

Around here they have population explosions associated with rainfall and the availability of green forage. They seem to displace other species under those conditions.

I see a lot of them at bird photography blinds -