20 
THE ESSEX NATURALIST. 
hold of a wriggling mouse, which has jumped to the ground and 
thus escaped. On one occasion, my gardener, lying on the 
bank of a ditch which divides the wood from an adjoining 
meadow, Whilst Waiting for a chance to get a shot at a rabbit, 
actually saw, in broad daylight, one of these mice climbing 
up and down the bark of an ash-tree beneath which he was 
lying. 
Quite recently, I have observed another instance of this 
mouse’s remarkable climbing powers. Growing on the bank 
of the ditch already mentioned is a large bush of Hawthorn 
(Cratcvgus oxyacantha), sixteen or eighteen feet high, one of 
several. Last autumn, it bore fruit (“ haws ”) in greater num¬ 
ber and of larger size than those on any of the other bushes. 
Passing it about 22nd or 23rd October last, I noticed that its fruit 
was then fully ripe and of unusual size and brilliance of colouring. 
I noticed, too, that the bank and the bottom of the ditch just 
below the tree w r ere both, strewn thickly with what appeared 
to be fragments of the haws growing on the bush above. Getting 
down into the ditch, I found that this is what they really were. 
I came to the conclusion that they could only have been gathered 
by mice, which must have climbed among the top-most twigs 
of the bush, sixteen or eighteen feet up, had then chewed them 
into fragments, and thrown them to the ground, wdiere they 
lay quite thickly, giving it a red tint as one viewed it at a dis¬ 
tance of a few yards. 
Examining next the individual berries, I perceived clearly 
that thev had been treated exactlv as are the rose-hios left 
by voles in old birds’-nests in hedges, as noticed above. It 
v r as obvious, in this case also, that the mice were in search of 
neither the soft pulp of the berry, nor its bright red outer skin, 
both of which wore torn off and thrown aside, though these are 
eaten so freely by thrushes, blackbirds, and the like. 
Often, the whole of the pulpy outer covering of the fruit w'as 
not torn off, but only that portion covering the base of the berry 
to a sufficient extent to enable the mouse to get at the “ stone.” 
Obviously, wdiat the mice had been after v'as the kernel inside 
the stone of the fruit; and, to get at this, they had nibbled 
away the base of the stone, until they had made a hole large 
enough to extract the kernel, exactly as in the case of the much- 
smaller seeds in the hips of the Wild Rose, as described above. 
