Pennsylvania Game News - June 2012 - 53

head toward me and it didn’t look like the face of a squirrel, but more like that of an overgrown white-footed mouse. I only had time to notice its large, roundish, shellshape ears, and its big, dark eyes before it jumped off the tree and disappeared. But I was almost certain it was an Allegheny woodrat. Years ago — on October 4, 1989 — my husband, Bruce, and our eldest son, Steve, had a perfect view of an Allegheny woodrat while driving up our hollow road at 10:45 p.m. What the woodrat was doing there was a mystery, because the habitat didn’t fit, as described then in the literature, the supposed requirements of an Allegheny woodrat. They live in caves and talus slopes, and the nearest talus slope on the far side of Sapsucker Ridge was father away than a woodrat’s range. Their intriguing sighting led me to learn more about this native packrat. And, the following autumn, Bruce and I accompanied PGC wildlife biologist Cal Butchkoski as he climbed a 100-foot high rock outcropping in an old-growth hemlock forest. As part of a study the Game Commission began in 1982, he had set 40 live traps baited with apples for woodrats in the caves and crevices the evening before and wanted to release any captives as quickly as possible to minimize stress on the animals. But when he released a male on my lap so Bruce could take photographs, the woodrat seemed anything but stressed. He spent several long, camera-clicking minutes climbing on my jean-clad legs before leaping gracefully to the floor of the cave and disappearing under a dead pile of leaves that was, in reality, his home. Made of sticks, shredded bark, grass and dried leaves, woodrat homes range in shape from cone-shaped to flattened. At that time, Butchkoski showed us pencil-eraser-size droppings in its latrine site under a nearby ledge, which serve as a signpost for anyone looking for woodrats. These droppings last for decades and, depending on their condition, researchers can
JUNE 2012

determine whether or not woodrats are still in residence. Needless to say, Bruce and our sons combed the talus slopes on Sapsucker Ridge but didn’t find any latrines. While Bruce’s and Steve’s sighting seemed unusual because of the woodrat’s distance from its rock habitat, mine was equally surprising because Allegheny woodrats are nocturnal. On the other hand, even though it has been 20 years since I last looked into the ecology of Allegheny woodrats, researchers are still puzzled by many aspects of their lives. Much has changed, too. Back then the Allegheny woodrat was considered to be a subspecies of the eastern woodrat (Neotoma floridana) which ranges south to Florida and west to Colorado. It had lost its original species status Neotoma magister in 1957, when researchers had relegated it to subspecies status based on comparative studies of eastern woodrat skulls and skins. But using new molecular methods, researchers conducted mitochondrial DNA analyses of 114 woodrats from 33 locations and proved that Allegheny woodrats are, indeed, a separate species from eastern woodrats. In 1997 they were once again listed as Neotoma magister in the “Revised Checklist of North American Mammals.” Furthermore, Allegheny woodrats are ecologically distinct from eastern woodrats because they live almost exclusively in caves, boulder fields, and talus slopes consisting of sandstone and/or limestone — socalled rock habitats. They build their nests on cave ledges, like the one we saw with Butchkoski, or in rock crevices. Females claim the best habitats to construct their nests and raise their young. In Pennsylvania, they breed as early as midMarch and, after about 35 days, give birth to one to four naked, blind young. Their eyes open at 2½ weeks, and they nurse until they are a month old. Then, although they may remain with their mother for a while, they begin to do their own foraging for leaves, fruit, mast, fungi and even twigs. Once they are on their own, they build
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Pennsylvania Game News - June 2012

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