(From Hudson's Naturalist in La Plata.)
Viscacha, or BIZCACHA (Lagostomus trichodactylus), a species of Rodent belonging to the same family as the Chinchilla (Chinchillidæ), occurring over an immense territory on the South American Pampas and adjoining country from the Uruguay River to the Rio Negro. It is a gregarious burrower, nocturnal in its habits. Twenty or thirty live together in their villages of deep burrows, around which they keep a patch of close-cropped turf in good order, so that their numerous enemies are described at sufficient distance to allow the slow-footed rodents time to scuttle into the pit-like mouths of the burrows. The earth brought up from the burrows forms a mound from 15 to 30 inches above the plain; and so numerous are the 'Vizcacheras' in some parts of the Pampas (especially the settled parts) that one cannot ride half a mile without seeing one or more of them. Burrowing owls and other birds also make themselves at home on the mounds of the viscacha. In unsettled regions the tame familiar rodent has deadly enemies in the puma and the jaguar. The fox, on the other hand, often establishes himself in a viscacha's burrow, and is not regarded by the full-grown natives with dread, though he lives largely on the young viscachas that get in his way. The viscachas often ruin much of a sheep-farmer's best pasture. A full-sized male is 22 inches in length to the root of the tail, the female somewhat smaller. See Hudson's Naturalist in La Plata (1892).