How Weird- The Mountain Beaver Quiz

Answer: False

Mountain beavers live in moist areas throughout their range. Most such habitat is not mountainous. In fact, they are much more common in lowland deciduous forests.

Answer: The Pacific Northwest

The mountain beaver is found from Point Reyes along the California coast and inland to the Sierra Nevadas, then northward to British Columbia. Most of the California subspecies are rare or endangered; mountain beavers are most common in Washington and Oregon.

Answer: An overgrown hamster

Mountain beavers look something like 4-pound brown hamsters with tiny, squinty eyes and tiny vestigial tails. Personally, I think they look like wombats. They look nothing like beavers and do not have webbed feet.

Answer: Red simple-tooth

The mountain beaver can be reddish-brown in color (but not red!) and has teeth that are less complex than many other rodents, yet another sign of its primitiveness.

Answer: It has sparse, rough hair

Mountain beavers bear only 2-4 young every year, unlike the huge litters produced many times a year by most rodents. To help compensate for this, they have a long lifespan- 5 or even 10 years in the wild.

Since they cannot pant or sweat, and must drink so much water, they are restricted to cool, moist environments.

Answer: Ferns, herbs and shoots

Ferns are the favorite food of the mountain beaver; a preference shared by very few other animals. Salal and salmonberry are also favorites. Mountain beavers sometimes damage planted conifer seedlings when their food sources are wiped out by intensive forestry practices.

Mountain beavers dry a large amount of plant material for winter food, then store it in their burrows.

Answer: Fleas

Hystricopsylla schefferi, found only on mountain beavers, is over 1/3 of an inch long! Nine other species of fleas are found on mountain beavers- four are unique to the species. These creatures have co-evolved for millions of years, and the fleas found on mountain beavers are as primitive as the critter itself.

The range of the mountain beaver is tiny- only 1/3rd of an acre to 3 acres, depending on the richness of the food supply- and it does not have cheek pouches or particularly large incisors, as rodents go.

Answer: In a burrow

Mountain beavers spend most of their lives in extensive tunnel systems, with separate chambers for bedrooms, pantries and latrines. They keep rocks in their tunnels, called "mountain beaver baseballs," which they use both to sharpen their teeth and to block off unused tunnels.

Mountain beavers do not climb trees well and do not live in alpine meadows. Although, due to their large drinking water requirements, they usually live near water, they do not often swim.

Answer: Both are rodents

The pika really does live in the mountains- but it's a member of the rabbit family, not a rodent. Like the mountain beaver, it dries plants for a winter food supply.

The pika is named for its alarm call- "pi-ka." One of the names of the mountain beaver is "boomer," although research has shown it does not make the booming noise once attributed to it.

And yes, Pikachu is named after the pika. As far as I know, there are no mountain beaver cartoon characters yet...

Answer: Squirrels

The DNA evidence shows that squirrels split off from the mountain beaver lineage approximately 35 million years ago. So squirrels are distant cousins- but still closer than any other rodents.