it quietly and it took no notice. I even scratched its head with my stick without
alarming it. When I withdrew my stick it quietly trotted off.’
Besides frequenting the woodlands at all seasons, these Mice swarm in the
hedgerows and country gardens; in the spring they are the detestation of the
gardener, and in the autumn of the farmer: The Wood Mouse is mainly a vegetable
feeder: corn, seeds, nuts,1 bulbs, pulse, roots, haws, and several wild fruits are its
favourite diet, but it is also insectivorous and carnivorous when it gets the chance.
Anyone who has tried to make a nice show of crocuses in his garden will have had
cause to anathematise this little rascal as well as the common sparrow. The sparrow
tears the flowers to pieces in wanton mischief, but the Mouse is after the bulb,
which is a very favourite food. Mr. Heatley Noble tells me that so fond of
crocus bulbs are they that whole colonies of these Mice move in the spring to the
vicinity of his crocus borders at Henley-on-Thames, and that he has trapped as many
as 300 in a fortnight in one small border which he showed to me. I have
found that they are most destructive to lily bulbs, especially to the common
white lily and Turk’s-cap, and have lost several by their depredations. They drill a
single hole straight down to the roots just as the lily is beginning to grow in
March. Strange as it may appear, their destructive habit of attacking bulbs has
resulted in benefit to the Dutch growers of hyacinths. The following extract
from a gardening paper is somewhat remarkable. It shows how hyacinths may
be increased.
The Dutch growers were helped out of the difficulty of rapid reproduction,
like the captive lion of fabled history, by a mouse. It was observed that certain
hyacinths here and there, instead of blossoming in the ordinary course, made
innumerable bulblets—hundreds, indeed—and in a few years these hundreds came
to perfection and blossomed with the best. This led to an examination of the
bulbs as soon as it was noticed that they were not by way of flowering. The
inspection disclosed the fact that the bulbs had been gnawed to the heart by mice.
So now, the way to increase a valuable hyacinth is to take a knife and slash
into its very heart with innumerable cross-cuts, and plant it in the ordinary way.
Mr. R. M. Barrington in his excellent account of the species in captivity2 says
the leaves, as well as the roots of plants, are eaten.
1 They will eat walnuts, so Mr. L. Adams informs me. A lot of walnuts picked up at Barnwell Castle show that the
gnawing is commenced at the rounded end of the nut, at the crack, never at the other end, which is thicker and harder.
Unlike monkeys, mice do not appear able to reject bad nuts, but gnaw to the kernel before they discover that their trouble is
s Zoologist, April 1882, p. 121.
‘ The leaves of clover,’ he says, ‘ and especially dandelion, were greatly relished,
and for an unexpanded flower of dandelion nearly everything else would be
deserted.’ They also ate arbutus berries, gooseberries, apples, and grapes, but did
not care for almonds. I have found them very destructive to young peas and
beans, and they will eat the leaves-^f sweet peas with as much enjoyment as
the sparrows do. Mr. Rope says they eat the berries of butcher’s-broom and
like carrots, which I can endorse. Those that I have kept in confinement were
particularly fond of them, and voles prefer them to any other food. The bark
of many shrubs and trees is eaten by these Mice, and Mr. Coward says that
green holly twigs are often stripped by this acrobatic little climber.
Fatio1 first mentions insects as forming part of their diet. Mr. Chas. Oldham
and Mr. T. A. Coward have both written on the subject.2 Mr. Coward say s :
‘ The Wood Mouse is not solely a vegetable feeder; insects and molluscs are
devoured, and in some cases the animal is practically insectivorous., In some old
copper workings in the New Red Sandstone the sandy floors of the tunnels are
covered with tracks left by their wee feet. For some time it puzzled my friend
and me to tell what species inhabited these caves, but a little bread and aniseed
settled the question, for few Mice can resist aniseed. We trapped a number of
Wood Mice and dissected them at once. Apparently the Mice do not leave the
tunnels, at any rate in winter, for in none of their stomachs did we find any
trace of vegetable matter; instead they were crammed with the remains of a
dipterous fly which swarms in the workings. This fly appears a dry and
uninviting meal, but possibly the security of the caves is attractive to the Mice:
here they are safe from owls and hawks, and weasels do not seem to have found
them out, for we never came across the footmarks of the little mouse-killer.
The Wood Mouse is nocturnal in its habits, so that the darkness of the caves
would be no drawback.’ And Mr. Oldham gives the names of the moths and
flies on which the Wood Mice feed in the disused copper mines on Alderley
Edge (November 1898): ‘ Besides two moths, Gonoptera lib a trix and Scotosia
dubitata, which are fairly abundant, a gnat (Culex), two flies (Blepharoptera
serrata and Borborus niger), and possibly other insects hibernate in countless
numbers on the roofs and walls of the tunnels. That the Mice frequent the place
in order to feed upon the insects was clear from an examination of the stomachs
of several which I trapped. Wings and empty skins of the gnat and flies, as
well as legs of the moths, were easily identified in their half-digested contents.
1 Fount ties Vertibris de la Suisse. * Oldham, Zoologist, September 1900, p. 4 2 1 ; Coward, Scotsman, June 24, 1902.