Animals

Country diary: little is known about this rare local rodent


I borrowed a friend’s dog to take for a walk from her house by the Saint-Laurent de Combelongue abbey. Joe’s a good dog – a border collie of grave disposition and venerable years. I like having a dog along when I’m walking. They have what the Anglo-Welsh poet Jeremy Hooker, in a fine essay on nature writing, defined as “ditch vision”. Its worth was demonstrated almost immediately as we turned up a steep road heading into the forested hills, with the Ruisseau de Maury running swiftly alongside.

Joe’s ears were pricked. He peered into the stream – “watchful in minutest observation” (Coleridge) – where water ran swiftly over a gravelly bed. Suddenly he plunged in and scrambled out again with something in his mouth. I wasn’t worried for what he’d caught. He’s a gentle, soft-mouthed dog, so I held out my hand for whatever it was.

Into it he dropped the oddest little mammal I’d ever seen. The size of a small mole, tiny-eyed, it had a dark pelage of coarse outer hairs and a fine inner coat. Its large back feet were webbed, and the tail longer than its body. Its long snout, quivering with vibrissae (whiskers), ended in two prominent nostrils.

I knew instantly what it was, though I’d never seen one before, let alone held one. This was the “trumpet rat” – Galemys pyrenaicus, the Pyrenean desman to give it its proper name. Extremely rare, its population is very local. In the last decade it’s declined to the point where its long-term survival is open to doubt.

Very little is known about the Pyrenean desman, its reproductive cycle or its young. It feeds on small crustaceans and larvae that it grubs out from under stones. You might say that it’s not the most attractive creature on the planet, and it certainly seems, on the brief acquaintance I had with it, shrill and aggressive. But so would I be if I were plucked thus from my habitat.

I asked Joe to sit, stooped down to the water, released the desman back to its proper element, where it kicked away rapidly back into the unknowns of its mysterious life.





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