Muskrat reports concentrate at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens, a wetland built around cattails and shallow ponds, and along the Anacostia River, Anacostia Park, and Theodore Roosevelt Island’s marshy fringes. Those are exactly the cattail-and-soft-bank habitats this species depends on, and DC has more of that habitat than its urban reputation suggests.
A muskrat is a housecat-sized wetland specialist, easy to tell apart from a beaver or a river otter by its long, scaly, side-flattened tail. It cuts and eats wetland plants like cattails and sedges, builds bank burrows or above-water lodges, and stays close to shorelines rather than ranging far from water.
Records here appear at a fairly steady pace with a spring peak in April and May, and this is one of the more frequently recorded mammals in the district’s dataset. That likely reflects Kenilworth’s status as a well-watched wetland as much as it reflects the muskrat’s real numbers.
Full species profile
