SHORT-TAILED FIELD MOUSE 13 1 
little animals are numerous ; a supply of bread and seed being 
scattered round it. 
The bank vole is a livelier and more intelligent animal than 
the field vole or short-tailed field mouse, and can be made 
very tame. For many years we have kept some of them here. 
My little niece had one (also rescued from the jaws of a cat 
at an early age) for two years, when at last a cat got at it and 
killed it. She could take it out of its cage and stroke it, and 
it would feed from the hand most readily. Other points of 
difference observed between these two species, while living 
together in the same cage, were these. The field vole is much 
more free with its voice than its relative, and when handled 
keeps on uttering its harsh, grating, chattering squeak. The 
bank vole is generally silent when taken in the hand, but when 
two old ones meet, and a difference of opinion ensues, they 
address each other in similar tones, each one rearing bolt 
upright, facing the other with fore paws stretched out in front 
of them as if to parry or ward off the attack of the other. In 
this, attitude they hop round each other, always keeping face to 
face. But I never knew these little exhibitions of temper go 
much further, or a real fight take place, for they are good- 
tempered, peaceable little creatures. Again, the field vole 
appears to be less expert as a climber than the bank vole. 
The latter animal can easily run back downwards, along the 
wire top of their large cage. But I have never seen the field 
vole do this, though the one I lately had under observation 
could climb up the ends of the cage, which were made of wire. 
When stretched out in running, the field vole looks par- 
ticularly thick and heavily built about the shoulders, and is 
by no means so elegantly formed as the other species. 
Both are, like the water vole, to a considerable extent diurnal 
in their habits. Captive bank-voles like to have a bush in 
their cage on which they can climb, which they do with the 
greatest ease and agility. These animals climb about the 
hedges in search of haws, of which they are very fond, and I 
once saw one in April, sitting high up in a hawthorn bush, and 
feeding on the young half-expanded leaves. 
The two species under consideration usually inhabit different 
sorts of ground ; the one preferring meadows, clover and lucerne 
fields and the like ; the other old rough hedge-banks, woods, 
plantations and gardens. Yet I once caught a bank vole, a 
field vole and a long-tailed field mouse in the same run. This 
was in a bushy place just outside a plantation. The skill and 
more particularly the rapidity with which the nest of this and 
other small rodents is made has often surprised me. A hand- 
ful of raw material— hay or dead grass pushed into the nesting 
box — is in a remarkably short time fashioned into a neat, com- 
pact, globular nest, rough on the outside, but beautifully soft 
