622 MURID^— EPIMYS 



the bars of a cage.^ This is a point, however, at which 

 narratives tend to verge on the poetical. 



Unlike the various wild mice, rats are very suspicious of 

 traps, but often succumb to their propensity for running through 

 holes or apertures ; for instance, if two boards be placed on 

 their sides so that the "run " passes through a narrow aperture 

 left between the boards, the rats will use the fenced part of 

 their pathway rather than climb over one of the boards, and 

 may thus be trapped.^ 



Although Common Rats frequent houses and ships, they 

 do not succeed so well in these situations as the Black Rat, 

 which is a far superior climber. 



The dietary of the Common Rat is very wide, almost as 

 wide probably as that of the domestic pig. The food of 

 any particular rat varies with its situation. In Ireland they 

 are so abundant that practically every part of the country, 

 except the bare hillsides and possibly the forests, is over- 

 run with them, and consequently the food available for any 

 particular individual is peculiar to its habitat. But should 

 one food fail, the animal is always ready to take to another, 

 thus rendering starvation a remote possibility. On the sea- 

 shore the food is what is cast up by the sea, together with 

 prawns, shrimps, shell-fish, fish, eggs and young of sea birds,' 

 and vegetable matter ; in marshes or pastures, mushrooms, 

 frogs and their spawn, toads, mollusca,* insects,^ fish, and small 



1 T. W. Kirk, Nature, loth September 1884. 



2 Owen Jones recommends setting the trap on the worn spot where a rat jumps 

 down. 



^ These (or young chicks) are often removed from under the sitting bird without 

 disturbing her. Much ingenuity is often displayed in removing them intact to the 

 burrow; the methods used are mentioned on p. 415, article Bank Mouse. For 

 sucking blackbirds' and robins' eggs, see R. Wayne, Zoologist, 1849, 2495 ; and for 

 a case where an egg was removed by one rat embracing it, the other pulling it by 

 the tail ! — H. Moses, Zoologist, 1865, 9431 (seen by a clergyman). 



* Including mussels— fresh-water or marine. Cocks tells us that, on the Thames, 

 the Brown Rats bring ashore and eat large numbers of mussels. For the correspond- 

 ing habit of the Water Rat, see p. 494. In some parts of New Zealand they are 

 stated to have almost extirpated a native species of crayfish and to dive for mussels 

 {Unio) ; these latter they open on the bank {Zoologist, 1887, 189). 



^ Whence they receive the same tapeworms and other parasites as hedgehogs 

 and small carnivora (Shipley, 65). Cocks has known rats to feed on the intestines of 

 living ducklings. 



