Whitman Mission National Historic Site - Mammals

If you arrive at dawn at Whitman Mission you might see whitetail deer, or mule deer walking through the park. Near the Visitor Center we see cottontail rabbits sometimes. The mice – meadow or deer mice, white-footed mice, and harvest mice like the tall grasses in the park. The pocket gophers live in both the tall grass and sometimes move into the mowed lawn near the Visitor Center. We usually have a pair of muskrats living in the Millpond that Marcus Whitman created, or sometimes in the irrigation ditch that he dug. When they get into the banks of the historic irrigation ditch we have to trap and move them because they burrow into the ditch bank and cause it to collapse. Rare visitors to the park are skunks, raccoons, weasels, porcupines, and an occasional badger that will dig a burrow in the side of Memorial Shaft Hill for the summer. We also see evidence of beavers knawing on trees along Mill Creek and the Walla Walla River, but only one decided to live in the park a few years ago. That beaver chewed down so many trees along our irrigation ditch that we had to have the Washington State Department of Fish and Game trap him and move him off of the park. Information on wildlife is limited because park inventories have not been completed. Quantitative inventories of mammals, birds, invertebrates, reptiles, and amphibians are needed, and some these will begin during the summer, 2002.