THE HARVEST MOUSE 573 



E. Newman' also observed that bluebottles were a favourite 

 food ; according to Mr H. H. Crewe ^ another captive ate blue- 

 bottles and other flies, butterflies, moths, bees, wasps, lepi- 

 dopterous larvae, and especially cockroaches, of which it was 

 known to eat fourteen in a night, seizing and worrying large 

 ones ; it also ate wheat, barley, oats, biscuit, cake, apple, nuts, 

 bread and milk ; but its favourite food was insects. Mr Rope's 

 specimen ate broom-seed, wood-lice, and flies ; describing its 

 methods of catching the latter, Mr Rope ^ says that the mouse 

 sits still until a fly buzzes near it, when, without apparent effort, 

 it is " firmly grasped in the paws," and rapidly devoured, the 

 wings and elytra being generally rejected. Mr Gurney's mice 

 loved burrowing into fresh clayey moss ; they were very fond 

 of canary seed, and ate the twigs and early leaf-buds of 

 hazel, as well as pieces of cooked meat off a mutton-chop bone.'' 

 Mrs Brightwen ^ mentions that her mice ate insects, canary seed, 

 brown bread, and that they burrowed for growing corn. Millais ^ 

 says they eat seed, shoots, and tender leaves ; they enjoy all 

 cereals, preferring wheat, but not caring for bread. In eating 

 wheat, as described by Mr Rope,' the mouse sits up and holds 

 the grain in a horizontal position between the fore paws, one 

 at each end, then revolving the grain rapidly, it slices off the 

 outer skin with its incisors until it obtains the clean white corn. 

 Like most murines the Harvest Mouse shows, at all events 

 occasionally, a propensity to lay up a store of provisions ; and 

 those that remain in the field are said to form stores for the 

 winter season, and congregate in small societies in the holes 

 under some sheltered ditch bank.^ In this connection one of 

 Bingley's* observations may be quoted. His mouse made a 

 nest of flannel and grass ; on opening this nest about the latter 

 end of October 1804, he "remarked that there were, among the 

 grass and wool at the bottom, about forty grains of maize. 

 These appeared to have been arranged with some care and 

 regularity, and every grain had the corcule, or growing part, 

 eaten out, the lobes only being left." Bingley soon afterwards 

 put into the cage about a hundred additional grains of maize. 



' Zoologist, 1867, 911. ^ Op. cit., 1867, 554- ^ Op. cit., 1884, 57. 



* 0/.«V., 1884, 112. ^ Op.cit.,\'fi. 6 Millais, ii., 179. ' O/. «/, 1884, 56. 



' y--sa.^i?. Journal of a Naturalist, 139. " Op. cit., 269. 



VOL. II. 2 2 



