Sussex County is Delaware’s rice rat country. Twenty-five of the state’s 32 records come from there, home to the great coastal marshes near Bombay Hook and Prime Hook and the bald cypress swamp at Trap Pond. The marsh rice rat is a wetland specialist, at home in both salt marsh cordgrass and freshwater swamp, and Sussex holds most of Delaware’s best examples of each.
November leaps off the calendar with 20 of the 32 dated reports, almost certainly the fingerprint of a targeted trapping survey rather than a November behavior. Rice rats stay active through the year.
NatureServe ranks the species S3, vulnerable, in Delaware. With the record this concentrated in one county and one month, the honest reading is that the state’s marshes have been sampled unevenly, and Kent and New Castle counties are far less explored than their marsh acreage would suggest.
