Red-backed Mouse 
Red-backed Mouse 
Evotomys gappert (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 generally darker in summer. In New Bruns- 
wick, Ontario, and perhaps 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. 
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. rhoads/) 
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 
rit 
