Endless Ocean

Speaking of Animals:Here's Something Unique About North America

There are more than a dozen kinds of Kangaroo Rats, all of them in the more or less desert country of our South-west. They are tremendous jumpers, for their hind legs are amazingly long and strong. When they take off through the air their long tails make very useful rudders.
Opossums cat almost anything they can find as they waddle slowly along the ground at night. Often they climb into trees to get their fruit. At such times they can hang by their tails for as long as they wish.

If an Opossum is attacked by a dog or a person he will pretend to be dead. Then after the danger has gone, he will get up and walk away as though nothing had happened.
The fur of this peculiar mammal is usually pale grayish.
But once in a while it is white, or "albino."

The Hoary Bat is another of our strange mammals. You usually find him in North America's forested regions as far down as southern Mexico. He is quite big, too, for a bat.
When his queer "wings" are fully spread they measure more than a foot from tip to tip. In the daytime he hangs upside-down from a tree branch, catching up on his sleep.
When evening comes he wakes up and flies around swiftly all night, feasting on small insects.

Shrews are probably the busiest of North American mammals. Practically all of their short life is spent scurrying around on the ground hunting for food: bugs and worms and almost any other kind of "meat."
Most shrews are smaller than mice, and some kinds are really tiny. The midget in the photograph weighs only about half an ounce.
Far up North, in Canada, you come to the land of the Snowshoe Hare. He looks much like a giant Cottontail Rabbit, except that his fur coat is whitish in winter and mostly brown in summer. The reason for this change is to make his life safer. During the long snowy season he is hard to see because his fur matches the snow. But in summer his brown coat can hardly be seen.
Snowshoe Hares have bigger, broader hind feet than an ordinary rabbit. This helps them move around when the snow is very deep and soft. So, you see, they really have built-in snowshoes!

A big Mountain Goat, the only true wild goat in North America, measures more than three feet high from his front feet to the top of his shoulders. Sometimes he weighs almost three hundred pounds.
One of the most amazing things about this handsome fellow is the way he can climb up or down rock cliffs so steep and smooth that no man could go there without using a rope. One reason for this ability is that the bottoms of his feet are rather like hard, non-slip rubber. They are also hollowed a little to give them a still better grip on the stone. Another important fact is that the Mountain Goat is so very strong that his front legs can pull him up a bad place in a cliff almost as if they were arms.

The Black Bear is the smallest of North America's four kinds of bears. He is also the most common one. You may find him in wild forested areas all the way across Canada, and southward through the mountains as far as Mexico.
This is the bear that you see doing tricks in the circus.
He is tremendously strong, and has more sense than you might expect. Fresh fish are among his favorite foods, but he will eat almost any kind of meat and will even raid the garbage cans in state parks. But during the fairly warm months he lives largely on ripe berries, tasty roots, insects, grubs and acorns.
The Black Bear's coat is not always the same color! In the eastern part of the country he is black, but in the West he may be either black, brown or cinnamon color. On one of the islands near British Columbia he is almost white. But no matter what color he wears, he is always just crazy about the taste of honey!

The text of information are very old from very old nature guides written for children and adults in some of these chapters. After 7 years of a break from this I have finally published a new chapter. And am halfway to finishing this book sorry about that.