54 NOTES — MAMMALIA. 



name for the two species of Zygodon Auct, viz., lapponiawi and 

 Mougeotii. We here indicate the chief changes in nomenclature 

 without expressing any opinion as to the advisability of them. 

 At the same time we must say that with most of them we entirely 

 agree, though for a time they may cause some little confusion 

 amongst students, but the same might have been said of Bry. Eur. r 

 and of Wilson's Bry. Brit., when first issued. Of the letter-press, 

 descriptions, synonymy, and plates we can only accord them un- 

 qualified praise, as being everything that could be desired. — C.P.H. 



NOTES—MAMMALIA. 



Scarcity of Lesser Horse-shoe Bat in Nidderdale. — In March last I went 

 to Ned Hole to see if there were any Bats of the Lesser Horse-shoe species 

 {Rhinolophtts hipposideros) and saw three suspended from the roof. There has 

 been a great number taken at one time or another. There is a stock left ; some 

 were in the rocks to breed from or they would have been exterminated. — James 

 Ingleby, Eavestone, Sep. 15th, 1888. 



Wild Cherry Stones used as Food by the Long-tailed Field-mouse. — 

 Having found occasion to visit the principal hamlet in my parish some three weeks 

 ago, instead of coming home by the road as usual, I diverged in such a direction 

 as to take me along a moor bank, and above a wood which clothes some part of 

 it, my path lying 750 ft. or so above the sea. As I was threading my way between 

 the sparse growth of ling which partly covered the bank, my attention was 

 attracted by a group of whitish objects of somewhat oval form, which were well 

 thrown up to view, inasmuch as they lay mainly on the black soil of the bank in 

 an interspace between the neighbouring tufts of moor growth. Taking some of 

 them up, I found they were the stones of the small black wild-cherry, or gean, 

 several trees of which kind have grown in the vicinity as long as I have known it. 

 These had all been gnawed with sharp teeth at the germ-end, so as to admit of the 

 extraction of the kernel. Hard and thick as the stones were the trouble and toil 

 of dealing with them thus must have been very great. I counted over 140 of 

 these stones, and had no doubt I could have added largely still to that number if 

 I had had time to hunt up those that had been carried down the slope by little 

 streamlets in wet weather. Just above the main group was a mouse-hole, which 

 I had no doubt gave admission to the domicile of a Long-tailed Field-mouse 

 (iMns sylvaticits). The nearest cherry-tree stood a long forty yards away. 

 Probably the gathering and bringing home of only the stones I saw had cost the 

 little collectors not less than five miles of going and coming, and that over and 

 above the work of getting through the stony shell which sheltered the minute 

 particle of food comprised in the kernel. But the length of the journeys taken, 

 and the apparently unlikely places to which these little creatures, I suppose in the 

 quest for food, actually push their advances, have long seemed to me worth a 

 moment's notice. There is a ridge of over a thousand feet high lying between one 

 of my chapels-of-ease and my residence. I have seen the traces of the Long- 

 tailed Field-mouse, on the highest part of the ridge, winter after winter, when the 

 snow was in a fitting state to receive and record the impressions made by their feet 

 and tail. But I have not noted the tracks of the other mice, or voles, in the same 

 way. These occur with us, but much more sparingly ; though I have occasionally 

 caught a short-tailed mouse (Arvicola ag?-estis) in a trap set in my cellar. As to 

 their long-tailed brethren, scores of them in heavy winters have been caught under 

 the same circumstances. Adjoining my garden on the east is a pasture-field. In 

 it I counted, last year, thirty-one small clumps of crocuses in bloom, all of them 

 resulting from the plundering propensities of the long-tails. They are very 

 beautiful, but very mischievous ; and where the gamekeeper and the gun-licensed 

 bird-butcher work their sweet will on kestrel and hawk, owl. weasel and 'clubster,' 

 t is a case of paradise for the mice as compared with what it was some thirty-five 

 or forty years ago. — J. C. Atkinson, Danby-in-Cleveland, Jan. 5th, 1889. 



Naturalist, 



