20 



found the heads of some of his fowls mangled and bloody in the 

 morning. Finally he found one dead, and one eye anfl the side 

 of the face eaten off. 



Mr. Bradford A. Scudder tells me that Mr. Henry ^Y. Walker, 

 a neighbor, told him that within the past six months more than 

 a dozen of his hens had been killed or seriously injured by 

 rats. The dropping board was close below the perch, and some 

 of the hens were attacked in the abdomen. Others were killed 

 apparently by a bite through the neck, and their brains were 

 eaten out. He believes that this was the work of rats, as no 

 other animal could have gotten at the chickens in that place. 



In August, 1914, I visited the heath hen reservation main- 

 tained by the Massachusetts Commissioners on Fisheries and 

 Game on Martha's Vineyard, and there saw the body of a young 

 Canada goose, fully fledged, that, according to the statement 

 of Mr. William Day, the deputy commissioner in charge, had been 

 killed by rats in the night. The head had been eaten off and 

 the neck stripped of flesh. Later, the rats ate out much of the 

 carcass, as may be seen by the illustration. In this case as 

 well as that of the hens and turkeys at Thompson's Island, the 

 circumstances were such that apparently no other animal than 

 the rat could have been responsible. 



Rodwell says that rats found an entrance to an aviary con- 

 taining 366 birds and killed .355 of them in one night. ^ 



Rats are very destructive to wild birds. A very large percent- 

 age of the eggs of bullflnches, linnets, and other small birds are 

 said to be eaten by them in England.^ Mr. C. H. Bradley, super- 

 intendent of The Farm and Trade School on Thompson's Island, 

 tells me that he and his family, hearing distressed cries from a 

 robin's nest at twilight, saw a rat that had climbed to the nest 

 and was eating the young birds. It is a well-known fact that 

 rats destroy the eggs and young of ground-nesting birds. Rats 

 sometimes exterminate colonies of sea birds. A few years ago 

 a ship was wrecked on an island off the Maine coast, which 

 was at that time the resort and breeding place of great num- 

 bers of terns. Rats that came ashore from the wreck multi- 

 plied exceedingly and destroyed or drove away all the sea birds 



1 Rodwell, James, The Rat, 1858, pp. 69, 70. 



2 The Spectator (London), Vol. 95, Oct. 21, 1905, p. 604. 



