The beat was subtle and steady, about 10 to 20 rapid drums for up to 20 seconds. Giant kangaroo rats (GKR) — Dipodomys ingens — were communicating with each other by drumming their long, narrow feet on the warm, gravelly loam in the southern fringe of the San Joaquin Valley.
As I quietly listened from within my tent, their incessant drumroll carried across the Carrizo Plain National Monument, the last and best bastion for this keystone species.
One of the smallest mammals on the last of California’s semi-arid grasslands is also its most important, the eco-engineer of 250,000 acres of sweeping plain and rolling mountain ranges — the Calientes and Temblors. Yet, when observing one of these endangered rodents, it is a bit of a head-scratcher how something so tiny can deliver such a heavy environmental impact, everywhere from its vast subterranean dwellings to the thermal updrafts in the blue skies above. Still, GKRs are the largest of more than 20 species of kangaroo rats and are endemic to California. They’ve been on the Endangered Species List since 1987, due to the loss of 98 percent of its habitat and the use of rodenticides.