Littledale's whistling rat

Littledale's whistling rat (Parotomys littledalei) is a murid rodent of southwestern Africa, one of only two species in the genus Parotomys, the other being Brants's whistling rat. It lives in southern Namibia and western South Africa, in some of the driest country of the region on the fringes of the Namib Desert and the Karoo, where its total area of occupation is under 2,000 square kilometres. Its habitat is shrubland on soil deep enough for its burrow systems, typically sand dunes, coastal hummocks, gravel flats and dry valley floors. It looks much like Brants's whistling rat, but differs in the structure of its incisor teeth, in its slightly more pointed ears and in the pitch and length of its whistling call; males measure about 215 millimetres from head to body. Active by day, it feeds on grasses, succulents and other fresh plant material that also supplies its water, and digs extensive burrows under bushes with several chambers lined with shredded vegetation, linked by surface tracks leading to feeding areas. It whistles shrilly when a predator appears. Its distribution is patchy: a long drought in 2003 wiped it out locally in Goegap Nature Reserve, which took about a decade to be recolonised. The IUCN rates it Least Concern, while the South African regional list rates it Near Threatened.