168 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



FIELD NOTES ON SOME OF THE SMALLER 

 BRITISH MAMMALIA. 



By Gordon Dalgliesh. 



During recent years a great deal of interest has been taken 

 in our native mammals, the result of this being that we now 

 have some good and useful books on the subject, besides nume- 

 rous papers thereon. That our knowledge is by no means 

 complete has been shown lately by the discovery of two new 

 Voles, viz. Microtus orcadensis* and Evotomys skomerensis,\ and 

 two new Mice from St. Kilda.J For some two or three years I 

 have been collecting small mammals, and have carefully kept 

 notes on any information I have gained in doing so, and I 

 venture to think that these may prove of interest to naturalists 

 and readers of ' The Zoologist ' in general. The means I em- 

 ployed for getting together a series of Mice, Voles, and Shrews 

 being, of course, traps; these being the ordinary "break-neck" 

 mouse-trap sold for a penny by all ironmongers. The only bait 

 I have used for the above mammals has been cheese. By far the 

 commonest mammals caught were Shrews, next to these being 

 Wood-Mice and Bank- Voles, and the rarest — strange as it may 

 seem— the Field-Vole. The traps were placed indiscriminately and 

 anywhere where I considered there was sufficient cover to shelter 

 " small deer." I found that on very windy or rainy weather I 

 never caught anything at all. 



Noctule Bat (Pterygistes noctula). — Although Gilbert White 

 named this species " altivolans," it does at times fly very low — 

 so low, indeed, that last summer I was able to knock several 

 over by means of a stick whilst they were engaged in catching 

 cockchafers. This Bat makes its - appearance early in the 



* Millais, ' Zoologist,' 1904, p. 244. 



f Barrett-Hamilton, ' Proceedings,' Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxiv. 

 sect. B, art. 4, pp. 315-19 (1903). 



I Barrett-Hamilton, Proc. Zool. Soc. 1899, p. 81. 



