Rodents captured in Virginia this summer are headed to breeding programs in other states to help bolster the populations there. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Allegheny woodrats are a type of packrat native to the Appalachian mountains. Their numbers are more stable in Virginia than elsewhere, so zoos in Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania have established breeding programs to help bring woodrats back in those states. In June, researchers from Radford University caught nine of the rodents and took them to the Wildlife Center of Virginia in Waynesboro.
CONNOR GILLESPIE: They got a quick health checkup. All of them were healthy … and then they were picked up by the Pennsylvania Game Commission to be taken to breeding programs, which is a really exciting prospect, that they're going to help their species in the wild.
Connor Gillespie is the center's outreach supervisor. This is the third year in a row the organization has participated in the woodrat program.
GILLESPIE: It's not just the woodrats that we're helping, but it's the ecosystems that they come from. They're important parts of their environment. They play the role of dispersing seeds, increasing soil fertility, even providing habitats for other animals, maybe other rodents, maybe other reptiles.
The species is threatened by a number of factors – including habitat loss due to development. That brings in higher numbers of raccoons looking to scavenge off of humans. But raccoons carry a type of roundworm that is deadly to the woodrats, killing individuals and reducing genetic diversity. Biologist Karen Powers, whose Radford students helped catch this cohort of woodrats, explained that Virginia's remaining contiguous forests in the Blue Ridge Mountains and westward have helped protect their populations here.
