Short-Tailed Meadow-Rats
and white-footed mice for miles, tied up in my handkerchief, and no attempt was made by my prisoners to use their teeth to assist them in escaping.
The gentle, graceful little jumping-mice, white-footed mice, short-tailed meadow-rats, and flying squirrels are all to be found inside the city limits of Greater New York, and some of their relatives are to be found in almost any rural place in this country. These interesting little creatures can be captured with ordinary box-traps, figure fours, or the square or round wire mouse-traps. The white-footed mice or deer-mice may be found in the abandoned nests of other rodents, in hollow logs, in old corn-stacks, in holes in the fence-rails, and under clods of old ploughed fields, or beneath brush-heaps in the fence corners.
In the late autumn, before the first snow comes, they have a very pretty way of
Utilizing Last Summer’s Birds’-Nests
by filling them with the soft down from the cat-tails of a neighboring marsh, or with moss and wood fibres, thistledown, or the silky feathers from the seed of the milk-weed. Like flying-squirrels, the little deer-mice bury themselves in the soft nests, and sleep away the day, emerging at night for food and exercise.
Fig. 12.
If the branch upon which the nest is located is but touched, the brown-backed, nimble-footed little squatter will poke his head from the middle of the nest, look inquiringly around, and if no danger appears the head is withdrawn, and the mouse resumes its slumbers; but if it is deemed that there is cause for serious alarm, it will spring from the nest, and with the agility of a squirrel run lightly up a branch, and from this point of vantage turn its bright eyes on the intruder with a sort of “please don’t” expression. If further frightened it will hastily leap to the ground and disappear in the brush and dry leaves.
Sometimes I have found birds’-nests with a neatly laid thatch roof over the bowl, and a round doorway gnawed through the side of the nest for a means of access to the interior, where, snugly curled up in a warm bed of down, the little white-footed mouse was sleeping.