Red-backed Mouse 



Red-backed Mouse 



Evotomys gapperi (Vigors) 



Called also Wood Mouse. Bog Mouse. 



Length. 5. 60 inches. 



Description. Ears short, just visible above the fur, about as in the 

 meadow mouse. Colour bright reddish chestnut with numerous 

 black hairs interspersed, sides buffy, below whitish, suffused with 

 buff, feet light gray, tail brown above, gray below. Colours gen- 

 erally darker in summer. In New Brunswick, Ontario, and per- 

 haps elsewhere in the northern part of its range individuals occur 

 which are entirely gray with no trace of the red chestnut colouring. 

 This seems to be a purely dichromatic variety not due to age or sex. 

 (Illustration facing p. 120.) 



Range. Alberta to Quebec and southward to the mountains of 

 Pennsylvania and New Jersey. 



This little mouse is a smaller cousin of the meadow mouse, 

 similar in build but with a longer tail and always recognized by 

 it chestnut colour. Its molar teeth, too, are rooted like those of 

 the false lemming mouse. They are found mainly in woodland 

 clearings, and open bogs, living in runways near the surface, or 

 sometimes in dense patches of grass, and building their nests 

 under a fallen log. The lumbermen of the Alleghanies see them 

 often scurrying away as some fallen tree frightens them from 

 their retreats, or the removal of a pile of bark lays bare their 

 passage ways. To them and to hunters generally these animals 

 are known as wood mice, but the term being used with equal pro- 

 priety in other parts of the country for the white-footed mouse it 

 becomes ambiguous. 



A closely allied variety of red-backed mouse is the most 

 abundant mammal on the Alpine summit of Mount Washington, 

 where it occurs in all sorts of situations, among the rocks, in 

 the moss and in the dwarf willows. 



The red-backed mouse of southern New Jersey (E. g. rhoadsi) 

 is an inhabitant exclusively of the cold, damp sphagnum bogs, which 

 intersperse the sandy pine barrens. Here it lives deep down in the 

 sphagnum, sharing the large runways wtth the meadow mouse, lem- 

 ming mouse and diminutive shrews. In winter the moss is frequently 

 frozen solid for several inches below the surface, which must force 



