Muskrats appear in 464 Connecticut records, with New Haven County alone contributing well over half and the rest scattered through Hartford, Fairfield, and the remaining counties. It is a wetland specialist, and its map is a map of the state’s marshes, ponds, and slow water.
A small engineer of the marsh
A muskrat needs water shallow enough to grow cattails and other emergent plants, which make up most of its diet and most of its building material. Where banks are soft it digs burrows with underwater entrances; in open marsh it heaps vegetation into a lodge that can stand shoulder-high above the surface. Mansfield Hollow Wildlife Management Area holds the state’s heaviest cluster of records, and the tidal and brackish wetlands along the coast, including the marshes at Hammonasset Beach State Park and Barn Island Wildlife Management Area, provide the same habitat in salt-scented form.
The March spike
Muskrats stay active all winter, feeding under the ice from lodges and underwater food piles, so the record never fully goes quiet. But March dwarfs every other month here. As the ice breaks up and the breeding season begins, muskrats travel farther, quarrel more, and cross shorelines and roads in daylight, becoming far easier to see than at any other time of year.
Status in Connecticut
NatureServe ranks the muskrat S5, Secure, in Connecticut, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
