Muskrat | Reflection Hunters Contest ~ Round 155

Hello, friends.
Last May I walked along the shore of a pond in a poplar grove. Still water, like a mirror, reflected our world, transforming it into a looking glass.

A muskrat sat on the trunk of a fallen poplar tree, basking in the spring sun and cleaning its coat.

I was walking with the dog and therefore, having noticed us, the muskrat became wary, ready to dive under the water at the slightest danger.

But my dog Sayan is the greatest pacifist in the world, he cannot even offend a mouse. The dog sat down on the bank, and I also sat down on a tree trunk. We stopped moving and making noise. The muskrat has poor eyesight and an unimportant sense of smell; it relies mainly on hearing.

After watching around for a while, the muskrat apparently decided that the dog and I did not pose a threat to it and continued to warm itself and clean its skin.

For our region, the muskrat is not a local animal. The muskrat originally lived in North America. It was first brought to Europe in 1905, and by the mid-thirties, in the Old World, the muskrat had already become a completely common animal. In the USSR, an experiment on muskrat acclimatization was carried out in 1926 on the Solovetsky Islands. Then in the late twenties they released a hundred pairs on the mainland. The muskrat has now spread throughout temperate climates throughout Eurasia, including China and Korea.

The first photo is submitted for participation in Reflection Hunters Contest ~ Round 155 by @olgavita
The last photo submitted for participation in PhotoFeed Contest - Wildlife Photography Round 66 by @photofeed
Camera: Nikon 1 S1
Location: Russia, Siberia
Friends, thank you for your attention, see you soon.
Best regards @irvet