220 



animals break and eat a few eggs at the top of a case and the broken 

 yolks run down and soil the eggs below. Then, too, rats carry away 

 unbroken eggs, displaying much ingenuity in getting them over 

 obstacles, as up or down a stairway. 



A commission merchant in Washington, D. C., states that he once 

 stored 100 dozen eggs in a wooden tub in his warehouse and left 

 them for nearly two weeks. He then found that rats had gnawed a 

 hole through the tub, just under the cover, and had carried away 

 71 J dozen, leaving neither pieces of shell nor stains to show that any 

 had been broken. 



Besides their destruction of eggs and young fowls, rats eat much 

 of the food put out for poultry. They are destructive also to tame 

 pigeons and their eggs, but particularly to young squabs. They 

 climb the wire netting and gain entrance to the cages through the 

 same openings by which the pigeons come and go. Fanciers are 

 often put to great trouble to protect their pigeons from rats, and 

 because of these pests some of them have abandoned the business. 



GAME AND WILD BIRDS. 



The rat is the most serious pest in European game preserves. A 

 writer in Chambers's Journal says: 



In a closely preserved country at the end of an average year the game suffers more 

 from the outlying rats of the lordship than from the foxes and mustelines together. 

 The solitary rats, whether males or females, are the curse of a game country. They 

 are most difficult to detect, for in a majority of cases their special work is supposed to 

 be done by hedgehog, weasels, or stoat. 



The propagation of game birds is becoming a promising industry 

 in the United States. The difficulties of the business are not yet 

 fully known, but the rat is an enemy with which the raiser of game 

 will have to contend. The animal has already proved itself a foe in 

 American pheasantries. 



Our wild native game birds are less subject to rat depredations 

 than birds kept in confinement. The nests of ruffed grouse are in 

 woodlands; those of the prairie hen and related species are on plains 

 remote from the haunts of rats. The quail, however, often makes 

 its nest within the summer range of rats, which destroy many of its 

 eggs. 



Rats are said often to destroy the nests of wild ducks, woodcock, 

 and other marsh birds. Terns have been entirely driven from their 

 nesting grounds in this way. In England the common tern was 

 extirpated from the Thames marshes; and on Loggerhead Key, 

 Tortugas Islands, off the Florida coast, rats recently nearly exter- 

 minated a colony of least terns by destroying the eggs. 



Chambers's Journal, vol. 82, p. 64, January, 1905. 



