![]() The group gets stopped there, and can accumulate on a riverbank, trying to figure out what to do. These groups of lemmings looking for a new home sometimes come up against natural barriers, such as rivers, lakes, an ocean, maybe even a cliff, though that seems conjectural. They’re not generally gregarious, but when they move they often go in groups. When their area is no longer sustaining their population, they move off to find a better situation. In Scandinavian species, for example, their populations tend to rise and fall over six- to eight-year periods. Like a lot of animals, they do move around in response to habitat and population conditions. Lemmings do not throw themselves off cliffs. This thing about lemmings jumping off cliffs during migrations is made up. Knowing no better, I just kind of obliviously accepted it as a weird fact of nature, though. But this thing about lemming suicide, which has become a sort of cultural cliché for oblivious mass self-destructive behavior (“drink the Kool-Aid”) always seemed particularly strange. There are some strange processes in nature - such as the wasp larva that injects a psychotropic drug into a spider to induce the spider to build a completely uncharacteristic web out of its dragline silk, and then uses that web for its cocoon. I turned up this information after thinking about lemmings committing mass suicide by jumping off cliffs. The northern bog lemming is listed as threatened on Maine’s Endangered & Threatened Wildlife list. Our two species are so rarely seen here that not much is known about them. They eat grasses and sedges, among other vegetable matter. They live in low, wet areas, including moist sphagnum moss. Lemmings are rodents, cousins of voles, shrews and mice. ![]() ![]() The southern bog lemming lives in the eastern half of the continental range, and farther south into the Midwest. Northern bog lemmings have been seen rarely in Baxter State Park and the western part of the state. The northern bog lemming lives mainly in a swath of subarctic North America running from Alaska through the middle of Canada to Québec, including the Gaspé Peninsula and southwesterly into Maine and New Hampshire. Our two species are the northern bog lemming and southern bog lemming. ![]()
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