#5 Wood Rats (Packrats, Trade Rats), Mice

You dirty, double-crossing rat.
- James Cagney, Public Enemy

She and He
The female and male appear similar, but Frank Sinatra’s allegorical Rat Pack nomenclature gives clue; male Packrats are well endowed, especially their massive testes. While failing to achieve the “penis to body mass” ratio of the record-holding Western harvest mouse, these randy rodents exploit their “largess.” When not obsessively hoarding food, they are compulsively copulating, with up to 120 sexual acts per hour (mounts and ejaculations). Roger and Jessica Rabbit, eat your hearts out and Guinness Book of World Records, take note.

Females stay busy between copulatory sessions, birthing up to five annual litters, each with as many as five young; the consummate breeding and mothering machine. Babies clamp down their teeth on mother’s nipples for their fist 12 days. Good news for mom… babies wean quickly and are sexually active in 60 days! Bad news… mom sometimes dies after weaning a very full litter of four or five.

ID and Habitat
The desert wood rat is grayish and reaches only 13 inches, including the tail. It eats prickly pear cactus and is prey for coyote, fox, snakes, Gila monsters and owls. Non-native to North America, wood rats migrated here from China and Ethiopia. Like most desert mammals, including illegal aliens, they are nocturnal.

Packrats build rough-hewn homes called “middens,” some older than Stonehenge. Using construction technology unknown to Druids, such as cementing earth with urine, dry-climate middens have been carbon dated to 40,000 years. Often constructed in rock crevices, middens can reach four feet across providing residents with summer cooling and winter heating. Cholla cactus palisades deter both predatory home-invaders and thieves who covet packrats’ treasure trove of stolen goods; rings, trinkets and other objects purloined from unsuspecting Homo sapiens.

Packrats, like cactus wrens who also use cholla for protection, may occupy several homes simultaneously, but far fewer than John McCain. Paleo—just-about-everyone: climatologists, ecologists, botanists, ethno-botanists, “McCainanites” and even anthropologists study middens; like accreted alluvium, they freeze-frame natural history and anthropological time.

Dangers Real and Imagined
The deadly Hanta Virus, Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS) is spread to humans through contact with rodents, their urine, and droppings. Of the 30 cases diagnosed annually, the fatality rate is 40%.

Hot Tip
Don’t be messing with animal waste matter or breathing poop dust. Also, never capture wild rodents as pets.

RX
If you find rodent droppings in your home, don’t touch. Call a professional. For DIY hazmat removal, follow some of these suggestions. Don your hazmat suit including rubber gloves, boots, goggles and HEPA breathing respirator. Don’t vacuum or sweep (dust spreads Hantavirus), but instead douse with bleach or a strong disinfectant. Mop or towel up, placing the towel inside a zip lock or trash bag, seal tightly. Disinfectant your hazmat suit before removing it. Mr. Clean “lysols” Pine-Sol poop, then self.

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Death Meter: 1 out of 10. (But inhale or ingest contaminated droppings, then it’s 4 out of 10).