Went out this morning to feed Frederick before the snowstorm really hit – after all, I can’t leave the poor guy hungry with a foot of snow coming down!  As I trudged out through the drifts, I could see multiple…somethings…sitting on the edge of the ice.  My first thought was mallards; mallards hang out there with Frederick all summer long, it’s possible that a few arrived and hunkered down for the storm.

As I got closer I could see that the shape was wrong for mallards.  For a few moments I even thought that perhaps they were just rocks sitting in the ice.  When I finally got up to Frederick’s area I finally saw what they really were – muskrats!

Muskrat family hanging out on the ice

I’ve seen muskrats swimming around before, but I’ve seen one out of the water for any length of time, much less a whole family of them.  It was hard to tell just what they were doing – looked kind of like they were eating, and from time to time they’d hop in and swim around a bit, dive under the ice.  They must have a den nearby, and despite the cold and the snow they appeared to be having a swell time.

The photos aren’t the best – they were taken with the Powershot SX120 IS, which I’m determining to have more flaws than I realized when I first began using it (it’s zoom performance is not so impressive after all).  Between pushing it to its maximum zoom, shooting a scene that suffers from back-lighting, and dealing with increasing snowfall, it was more than the Powershot could really handle.  (If I knew I was going to encounter critters, I might have brought the 7D+Sigma combo, although I wasn’t really keen on trudging through drifts with it.)

There’s a lot of Photoshop work at play to get the photos to a point where I was even willing to post them.  They all required a Shadows/Highlights adjustment, significant cropping, and a strong application of High-Pass sharpening.

Look close at the center muskrat - you can see his little hands!

Regardless, I’m thrilled to have seen the little guys!  They were a great surprise, and it just goes to show that it pays to bring a camera with you, even when you don’t think you’ll need it.