Pack rats will gather everything from plants and branches to insects and bones, which they pack into their middens. ![]() These stockpiling rodents tend to only range 100 to 150 feet from their middens, collecting items from about a 50-foot radius. Although pack rats are similarly sized to their city-dwelling brown and black rat cousins, they have bushy (not hairless) tails and belong to the genus Neotoma rather than Rattus. Pack rats, also known as wood rats, are notorious for collecting an odd assortment of items from their surroundings to make their nests, called middens. In centuries-old homes of the antebellum South, objects preserved in rats’ nests have even taught us new things about the lives of enslaved African Americans whose stories were not preserved in the written records of the time. Paleobotanists and climatologists have studied the ecosystems of the past by analyzing millennia-old material in rat nests, tracking ice age climates and changing flora across the American Southwest. The materials that rats collect and store in their nests, from naturally occurring items like sticks and seeds to human creations like trinkets and tchotchkes, are a treasure trove for scientists and historians alike. In the scientific community, however, literal pack rats and other rodents play an important role in preserving history. ![]() ![]() Calling a person a pack rat may be considered an insult to most, bringing to mind scenes of hoarders navigating piles of ephemera and what most would call trash.
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