248 BRITISH MAMMALS 



insects. In its burrows, or nests, it stores during the summer and 

 autumn enormous quantities of food — acorns, beech-mast, ears of 

 wheat, barley, and oats, hazel-nuts, beans, haws, and many other 

 seeds and berries. These supplies of hidden food are so considerable 

 that they are a great attraction to pigs when turned loose. They 

 are smelt out and rooted up by the pig, and thus much further 

 damage is done indirecdy by the wood mouse. Wood mice very 

 often adapt mole-runs to their purposes as burrows, but here they 

 occasionally meet with a serious foe, for the mole greedily devours 

 their tender young, and thinks nothing of attacking, killing, and 

 devouring the mother mouse. Birds' nests are occupied, or 

 regular nests of woven grass are made by the mice themselves in 

 hedgerows, amongst wheat, or in the long grass that is ripening 

 for hay. It is much more probable that it is to the wood mouse 

 and its nest in the harvest-field that Burns addressed his famous 

 lines, rather than to the harvest mouse, which is scarcely found in 

 Scotland.^ The wood mouse does not undergo regular hiberna- 

 tion, but nourishes itself during the winter from its huge supplies 

 of stored food. Though leading a life in the country by prefer- 

 ence, it is, in fact, the country mouse of the fable — it does not 

 shrink at times from coming into houses, where it often displays 

 greater boldness even than the town mouse. 



Mus sylvaticus appears to be an old inhabitant of Britain, as 

 its fossil remains can with some probability be discerned amongst 

 the relics of the early Pleistocene Mammalia of East Anglia. 



Mus minutus. The Harvest Mouse 



This is the second smallest mammal in England. The 

 length of average specimens from the tip of the nose to the root 

 of the tail is about i\ in., and the tail is almost exactly the same 

 length as the body. The tail is very lithe and mobile, and 

 appears to be distinctly prehensile. It can be coiled twice round 

 objects, and the tip grasps somewhat tightly. The ears are not 

 proportionately so large as in either the house or the wood mice, 



^ " The best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft a-gley." 



