I02 MAMMALS OF PENNSYLVANIA AND NEW JERSEY. 



Habits, etc. — What the common meadow mouse does so largely above 

 ground this strenuous cousin performs beneath the surface. Unfortunately 

 for mankind and fortunately for himself, the pine vole is one of the " hidden 

 works of darkness." Out of sight is out of mind, and, in most cases, out of 

 knowledge. Thus it was that the popular and still persistent error arose of 

 attributing the mysterious underground robberies which yearly spirit away 

 thousands of dollars' worth of seeds, grain, radical and tuberous-rooted vege- 

 tables, plant roots, bark of fruit and shade trees, bulbs and buried winter 

 stores belonging to the farmers of southern N. J. and Pa., to moles, shrews, 

 meadow mice, insects, birds, in short, anything which the vexed ingenuity of 

 man could devise as a scape-goat. On the tract where 1 now reside at Au- 

 dubon, Camden Co., N. J., there might be found in a narrow belt along the 

 banks of a stream, and in the old unmowed fields comprising about 50 of the 

 whole 125 acres, certain spots where meadow mice, M. pennsylvanicus, were 

 common. These would not aggregate 500 specimens, and if the ground had 

 been mowed the number would be diminished more than half. On the re- 

 mainder practically no meadow mice exist. But the entire soil of this tract 

 of ground, regardless of its condition, whether sod, fallow, orchard or wood, 

 is traversed more or less intricately with the burrows of the pine woods vole. 

 In my garden of 2 acres they so abound that, after irrigation, their net-work 

 of runways, collapsed by the water, are mostly remodeled before it has had 

 time to reach the subsoil, and a spade- full of earth thrown out at random 

 seldom fails to reveal one of their burrows or that of a mole, which both use 

 promiscuously. In this garden not a meadow mouse cares to set foot in 

 summer, yet these cousins of his destroy at least 20 per cent, of the seeds 

 planted and 10 to 15 per cent, of the growing and perfected potatoes, beets, 

 parsnips, celery, cabbages and ruta baga turnips. They destroyed a whole 

 planting of lima beans after growing in some cases to the height of eight 

 inches, many replanted hills being eaten off three times. In the orchard 

 where meadow mice could not exist, these burrowing rascals have completely 

 denuded the entire basal system of roots where they diverge underground 

 from the parent trunk, in this way killing in 2 years apple trees 15 and 20 

 years old. 



It would make easy calculation, on the basis of the experience of any truck 

 gardener in south Jersey (for my own experience is a fair sample, as I have 

 known while working on other farms and from the complaints of my neigh- 

 bors) to show that this mouse destroys many times more value than all the 

 noxious birds and mammals (the English sparrow excepted) put together. 

 To make the identification of this vole more certain, I will quote from a 

 paper published by me in 1897 in a local weekly. This paper answers a 

 southern correspondent who had confounded the depredations done by this 

 mouse in her garden with those of the short-tailed shrew or mole shrew, 



