622 MURIDAZ—EPIMYS 
the bars of a cage.’ This is a point, however, at which 
narratives tend to verge on the poetical. 
Unlike the various wild mice, rats are very suspicious of 
traps, but often succumb to their propensity for running through 
holes or apertures; for instance, if two boards be placed on 
their sides so that the ‘“‘run” passes through a narrow aperture 
left between the boards, the rats will use the fenced part of 
their pathway rather than climb over one of the boards, and 
may thus be trapped.’ 
Although Common Rats frequent houses and ships, they 
do not succeed so well in these situations as the Black Rat, 
which is a far superior climber. 
The dietary of the Common Rat is very wide, almost as 
wide probably as that of the domestic pig. The food of 
any particular rat varies with its situation. In Ireland they 
are so abundant that practically every part of the country, 
except the bare hillsides and possibly the forests, is over- 
run with them, and consequently the food available for any 
particular individual is peculiar to its habitat. But should 
one food fail, the animal is always ready to take to another, 
thus rendering starvation a remote possibility. On the sea- 
shore the food is what is cast up by the sea, together with 
prawns, shrimps, shell-fish, fish, eggs and young of sea birds,® 
and vegetable matter; in marshes or pastures, mushrooms, 
frogs and their spawn, toads, mollusca,* insects,° fish, and small 
1 T. W. Kirk, Vature, 1oth September 1884. 
* Owen Jones recommends setting the trap on the worn spot where a rat jumps 
down. 
3 These (or young chicks) are often removed from under the sitting bird without 
disturbing her. Much ingenuity is often displayed in removing them intact to the 
burrow; the methods used ‘are mentioned on p. 415, article Bank Mouse. For 
sucking blackbirds’ and robins’ eggs, see R. Wayne, Zoo/ogist, 1849, 2495 ; and for 
a case where an egg was removed by one rat embracing it, the other pulling it by 
the tail !—H. Moses, Zoo/ogist, 1865, 9431 (seen by a clergyman). 
* Including mussels—fresh-water or marine. Cocks tells us that, on the Thames, 
the Brown Rats bring ashore and eat large numbers of mussels. For the correspond- 
ing habit of the Water Rat, see p. 494. In some parts of New Zealand they are 
stated to have almost extirpated a native species of crayfish and to dive for mussels 
(Unio) ; these latter they open on the bank (Zoo/ogist, 1887, 189). 
5 Whence they receive the same tapeworms and other parasites as hedgehogs 
and small carnivora (Shipley, 65). Cocks has known rats to feed on the intestines of 
living ducklings. 
a 
