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We live on Chocolate Lake in Halifax, and during our time the garden has always had a multi-stalked rose bush growing within a couple of feet of the lake edge. This was trained up high over a tree and has (or had) six sturdy woody stems each about 1 inch thick: it must have been growing there for 20+ years. A couple of days ago I noticed that most of the leaves on the rose were shrivelled and dying, and traced this back to find that 5 of the 6 stems appeared to have been hacked through with a machete, probably about a week earlier. After thinking dark misanthropic thoughts, on closer inpection there were some striations on the hacks and the two ends of each hack didn't seem to match. It looked as if short sections had been removed by something with teeth -- looks like a rodent did it. This urban lake doesn't look like prime beaver habitat and I've never seen or heard of one living or visiting locally on the lake, but at least one muskrat has lived here for some years and is still around. Question: this muskrat regularly chews off nearby soft plant shoots (lilies?) that grow directly out of the lake near the edge. I thought that muskrats exclusively subsist on such soft diet material and don't go after woody shrubs or trees in the manner of a beaver. Is this correct, or could the muskrat be a possible culprit for the woody rose incident? Steve
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