Their food includes a great variety of seeds, small fruits and succulent matter mainly from wild plants of no economic value. They lay up stores of seeds in their nests and in little special storage places for severe or inclement weather.
Some of the species dig burrows in the ground where their nests are hidden. Most of them, however, build globular nests of grass and other vegetable matter several inches in diameter in dense grass close to the ground, or up in the midst of rank growths of weeds, or even as high as eight or ten feet from the ground in bushes and low trees.
Sometimes they take possession of convenient sites already provided, such as old woodpecker holes, cavities in fence posts, knot holes, and deserted birds’ nests, including the nests of the cactus wren and orchard oriole, which they remodel to suit themselves. Their nests are lined with fine downy material such as the pappus of the milkweed or the cattail flag, and have from one to three small openings usually located on the underside. In these neat homes they have several litters of from one to seven young each year.
Some of their bush nests three or four feet from the ground were found when I was hunting on El Mirador coffee plantation in Vera Cruz. Often on approaching them, the single occupant would dive headlong into the grassy cover below and disappear. But sometimes when disturbed they would come out and run about through the tops of the bushes, leaping from branch to branch with all the agility and graceful abandon of pigmy squirrels. Several times they were seen to stop and sit crosswise on the branches with their tails hanging straight down. When they move about among the branches they sometimes coil the tail around the twig as an opossum might, to give them a more certain hold.
While harvest mice may be seen at their nests by day, they are mainly crepuscular and nocturnal, and so retiring in habits that their presence may be entirely overlooked unless special search is made to locate them. Where found their pretty ways well repay the observer who has the patience to spend a little time with them.
THE GRASSHOPPER MOUSE (Onychomys leucogaster and its relatives)
(For illustration, [see page 527])
The grasshopper mice are notable for the delicate coloring and velvety quality of their fur. While closely resembling some of the white-footed mice, they may readily be distinguished from them by more robust form, short, thick tail, and the character of the fur.
Only two species, each with numerous geographic races, are known and both are peculiar to North America. Characteristic animals of the arid and semi-arid treeless plains, plateaus, and foothills of the West, their known range extends from Minnesota and Kansas west to the Cascades and to the Pacific coast of southern California, and in the North, from the plains of the Saskatchewan southward to San Luis Potosi, on the tableland of Mexico.
Some races live on the grassy plains west of the Mississippi, but the majority prefer the looser soil and sandy areas of the more arid Great Basin and the even more desert Southwest, where the vegetation is characterized by a scattered growth of woody plants, including many species of cactuses, yuccas, agaves, sagebrush, greasewood, mesquites, acacias, and other picturesque types.