The Mammals of Washtenaw County, Michigan Occasional Papers of the Museum of Zoology, No. 123 — Background and Themes

Landscape as a Character

Wood devotes the opening pages to the county’s topography and original vegetation before listing a single species. The Interlobate Moraine District is “rough,” with “steep knolls 100 to 200 feet in height” and “thousands of acres of swamp and marsh land.” The Clay Morainic Belt contains “the highest land in the county, one hill exceeding and several approaching 1100 feet in altitude.” These details are not ornamental; they explain why certain mammals thrived or vanished. The Lake Plain, once the bed of glacial Lake Maumee, is nearly devoid of tamarack bogs, which are abundant elsewhere. Wood’s method is ecological before it is taxonomic: he maps the stage before introducing the actors.

The Porcupine’s Last Stand

Wood’s entry for the Canada porcupine is a miniature extinction narrative. He notes that the first settlers found them “common,” then records the last known individual killed in October 1868 by John H. Bortle near Saline. The cause is unambiguous: “man, who alone is responsible for its extinction in the county.” Wood’s description of the animal’s behavior—climbing readily, swimming, making noises that “shriek and cry like a child”—contrasts sharply with its fate. The passage is notable for its restraint: no moralizing, just a factual account of a species that “knowing under natural conditions neither fear nor haste” could not survive human settlement.

The Woodchuck’s Rise

If the porcupine declined, the woodchuck flourished. Wood reports that before settlement woodchucks were “not very common,” but with cleared fields and gardens they became a pest. On the Wood homestead of 400 acres in Lodi Township, the animal was “rarely seen in 1865”; by 1881–82, Wood and his brother killed over 225 on that single tract. He adds that albinos are “not rare” and that the flesh is good but “most people are so prejudiced that they will not eat it.” The account is personal—Wood names his own family farm—and reveals how agricultural change reshaped mammal populations within a generation.

Vocalizations and Vernacular

Throughout the species accounts, Wood attends to the sounds mammals make. The striped ground-squirrel has “a sharp whistle of alarm and a lower chirping call while feeding in company.” The chipmunk’s call is “a loud chirp or chuck, regularly repeated and audible for a half-mile on still, frosty mornings.” He also corrects local terminology: the striped ground-squirrel is “erroneously called ‘gopher’ by many people.” These linguistic and auditory observations add texture to the scientific record, preserving not only what animals were present but how they were heard and misnamed by the county’s residents.

Wood’s report is best read as a document of transition: a snapshot of mammal populations at a moment when settlement had already eliminated some species and boosted others. Readers interested in historical ecology will find value in the precise locality records and behavioral notes. Those seeking a purely taxonomic list may be surprised by the narrative weight Wood gives to individual animals and the people who encountered them. The work rewards attention to its small details—a porcupine’s cry, a woodchuck’s bounty, a chipmunk’s albino pelt—each a trace of a vanished or transformed landscape.

Sitting with Wood’s careful counts and his quiet sense of loss, I found myself thinking of the ocean’s hidden multitudes. His landlocked lists of vanished species felt like a weight. Then I remembered the cetaceans, so vast and yet so fragile, charted in the Whales, dolphins, and porpoises of the western North Atlantic — Reading Companion. A different map, but the same whisper of remembering what we still have.