Many nocturnal animals lack the high-profile adaptations of real night specialists like bats and owls; instead they call on their collective senses of sight, smell, and hearing to make nighttime living work for them.
Mammals: Some nocturnal mammals are familiar to people, while others are rarely seen. The bandit-masked raccoon is a well-known nocturnal hunter. The raccoon's shy cousin, the ringtail, hunts at night and is almost never seen by people. One of the ringtail's primary prey animals is the nocturnal woodrat or pack rat.
Kangaroo rats are classic nocturnal rodents. You won't see them by day because they shelter in their burrows, but shine a light across their grassland or desert habitat at night, and you'll see a world alive with jumping 'roo rats. Kit foxes, too, are almost entirely nocturnal, perhaps because kangaroo rats are a primary food source.
Other mammals are sometimes seen during the day, but they do most of their food gathering and hunting at night. The badger–a virtual digging machine–sniffs out mice, gophers and other rodents in burrows below the ground and digs rapidly to uncover them. The carnivorous grasshopper mouse patrols rodent runs at night, preying on other nocturnal mice (including other grasshopper mice!) as well as grasshoppers. Through equipped with their own unique defenses, both the skunk and the porcupine prefer nighttime for their foraging.
North America's only marsupial, the opossum, wakes at twilight to begin its search for fruit, roots, insects, small mammals or anything it can find. With few defenses beyond its habit of playing dead when threatened, the opossum derives protective advantage from the dark. (P.S. For you opossum fans: This animal also gains survival advantage from its high reproductive rate. And–a little known fact–the opossum has the greatest number of teeth of any North American mammal.)
Herptiles (Amphibians and Reptiles): As with many other nocturnal animals, darkness affords salamanders, frogs and toads better protection from predators. It also increases their hunting success because their insect prey is more active and plentiful at night. But most herptiles are nocturnally active because it helps their temperature regulation. With moist, porous skin, the tiger salamander must avoid the drying effect of the hot sun. Salamanders emerge at dusk from their daytime hiding places under leaf litter or at a pond's edge.
Fish: Some fish are more active at night then during the day. Brown trout increase their hunting success by feeding on aquatic insects that drift downstream at night. Lake trout move higher in the water as the sun goes down.
Next: A Little Night Music
(The information contained in these issues of Colorado's Wildlife Company was accurate at the time of original publication. Situations and circumstances described, staff positions, contact information, and dates of some events may have changed in the interim. Present knowledge and understanding of biological and behavioral facts and information may also be different, now, than presented here.)