Uh-Huh.

The one I have is lighter but not snow white. I have sold a couple like yours for taxi for good money.
Close to water? I have found them clear to the top of the ridge. In fact, one of the rare bit of sign I saw this year was at the very top of a 3000-foot ridge. It does rain a lot here though so close to the clouds. Maybe that is close to water. It sure was wet when I was trapping there.

Pretty rare to see them, most loggers have never seen one. Alive at least. I trapped a few that had eroded a bank putting a house in danger of going into a river, they had spotted one once from the deck right over the burrows. They had to have the whole bank engineered out to build up and save the house. They need to be close to water because there kidneys not very efficient. Kinda a prehistoric animal.

wws

I'm going to push back a little more forcefully on this idea they need to be close to water. Yes, it is very wet here, but we do have dry times, and they were everywhere even a long way from any water during the summer months. Where I grew up, we were easily a half mile from any sort of stream, even a trickle, yet they were around the edge of the yard. Highest ridges had them and they don't travel far.
They are nocturnal is the reason nobody sees them but once in a while they will be out on a very dark stormy day.
They do make a pretty good cat bait. They have a strong musky odor, and, on the coast, they took the place of hares as the primary food source for cats. Our cat population has taken a big drop without them.
I watched one up in a tree one time and it was quite entertaining. They are busy. It would cut a limb off and jump out and head for its burrow and back for another load. Yes, they do climb small trees to cut limbs. Those limbs they will peel just like their namesake.

good read guys, never heard of them

How do they taste?

Interesting stuff Bruce, I've only seen their burrows fairly close to water. You can see their active burrows because they will have ferns partially pulled into them. I don't see many anymore.

I trapped them as a kid and sold them to an old Indian lady but they have no fur value on the fur market. Timber companies used to hire trappers for them and last I heard they had went back to poisoning them again on the coast. I haven't been over there in years, but that may be why you guys aren't seeing many of them any more. Side note, that study that determined that mountain beavers were bobcats primary food in Western Washington is why bobcats were added to the hound ban there. The timber companies (Weyerhauser took the lead) sat in with the antis when they wrote up the initiative and had bobcats added to it, because they wanted all the bobcats they could get to eat mountain beavers, because they ate their little trees.

Yep bearcat, trappers can never get permission to trap bobcats on the the large coastal tree farms because of that.

But the pelts would probably sell at the ITA sales!

is this what they call a marmot sorta a cross between a groundhog(woodchuck)and a beaver

No, marmots are a different animal.

Seen a show on them long ago. They are great hoarders. They even found dead birds in their hoardings at times

There was a time when cats were a good price that I decided to forego beaver trapping and concentrate on cats. I needed bait, so I trapped mountain beaver for bait. You would be surprised what uses their tunnels. Civets, mink, weasels pretty common but also birds. In nasty weather birds including grouse would show up. Weird looking small rodents that I had never seen before, and I even caught a bobcat once that I guess was just feeling around in the hole to see what it could grab.
Anyplace where there is a colony of MBs is a good place for a cat set. One of the rare places where I found some fresh MB digging this year produced two cats.


The smell of them is quite musky. Have to be pretty hungry to get past that.

They are a really interesting animal from a scientific perspective. I believe they are the oldest surviving rodent, pretty much unchanged for the last 55 million years or so. They are studying their kidneys among other things in order to figure out how they can metabolize toxins in the plants they eat that other animals can't; such as rhododendrons. They also host the worlds largest flea that does not exist on any other animal.

I've know of a couple of dogs that have gotten pretty tore up by them, apparently they are more vicious than they look. I guess you'd have to be tough living along side saber tooth tigers, dire wolves and other such critters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_beaver

Never seen as many as there is along the highway 2 corridor in WA. We did some tower units by gold bar where we were seeing them daily