THE LONG-TAILED FIELD MOUSE. 385 



Short-tailed Field Mouse in the hedges while * bat-fowling ' at 

 night for small birds. He has also found that when the Mouse 

 eats hips, it nibbles off one end and extracts the seeds, rejecting 

 the husks as uneatable. Man, however, acts in just the reverse 

 manner, rejecting the seeds with their cottony envelopes, and 

 eating the sweet husk, or sometimes boiling it up with sugar 

 and making it into a conserve. 



The cherry-stones are mostly obtained through the agency of 

 blackbirds, thrushes, and other feathered fruit lovers. These 

 birds pluck the cherries, often leaving the stones adhering 

 slightly to the stalks, or dropping them on the ground. In the 

 former case the stones are sure to be flung down when the legi- 

 timate owner gathers the fruit, so that the Mouse who is fortu- 

 nate enough to live in a cherry-growing district is sure of a 

 winter stock of food. Several hundred cherry-stones are some- 

 times placed in a single storehouse, affording sustenance to 

 several mice. 



The animal eats them in a peculiar manner. Instead of split- 

 ting them open by using the chisel-edged teeth or wedges, after 

 the manner of schoolboys opening nuts and peach-stones with 

 their pocket-knives, the Mouse nibbles off one end of the stone 

 so as to make a little hole, and through this small aperture it 

 contrives to extract the solid kernel. 



The Long-tailed Field Mouse or Wood Mouse {Mus syl- 

 vaticus) also makes a winter nest, in which it lives, but to which 

 it does not absolutely confine itself, making several nests in the 

 course of a season, and selecting such spots as appear to please 

 its fancy at the time. Mr. Briggs remarks that he has known 

 one of these mice to make a nest in three days. 



One species of Field Mouse sometimes does good service to 

 mankind, through its habits of storing up its winter stock of 

 provisions. Lately in the country about Odessa vast armies of 

 mice were seen, and evidently did much damage. Not only did 

 they eat the crops, but they swarmed into the houses in such 

 numbers that traps could hardly be set fast enough, twenty or 

 thirty being often taken in a single day. 



Hurtful though they were in some senses, they nevertheless 

 cc 



