Little is known definitely concerning the family life of these animals. The young, from one to four in number, are amazingly large at birth and appear fully armed with spines. Even before they are half grown they adopt the solitary habit of the adults and wander forth to care for themselves.
Porcupine’s have an intimate connection with the romantic side of early Indian life in eastern America. Their white quills were colored in bright hues by vegetable dyes known to the Indians and served to make beautiful embroidery on belts, moccasins, and other articles of aboriginal clothing until primitive art gave way to the more tawdry effects of trade goods.
THE JUMPING MOUSE (Zapus hudsonius and its relatives)
(For illustration, [see page 514])
In several ways the jumping mouse is unique among American mammals. Its strongest characteristics are a dull, rusty yellowish color, a slender body about three inches long, a remarkably slender tail about five inches in length, and long hind legs and feet, which are specially developed for jumping, like those of a little kangaroo. In addition it is provided with cheek pouches, one on each side of the mouth, in which it gathers food to be carried to its hidden stores.
The long tail serves as a balance during its extraordinary leaps, some of which in a single bound cover a distance of about ten feet. If by accident one of these animals loses its tail, whenever it jumps it is thrown into a series of somersaults, turning helplessly over and over in the air.
The jumping mice form a small group of species and geographic races closely similar in general appearance. They are the sole representatives in North America of the Old World jerboas and are themselves represented elsewhere by a single species occurring in the interior of China. The jerboa family contains in addition many larger and curiously diverse species distributed over a large part of Asia, Africa, and southern Europe. Many Old World jerboas are desert animals, some of them exact reproductions in shape and color of the kangaroo rats of arid regions in the Western and Southwestern States and Mexico, although they are in no way related to those animals.
Jumping mice are distributed over most of the northern parts of North America from the Atlantic coast of Labrador to the Bering Sea coast of Alaska, and southward to North Carolina, Illinois, New Mexico, and California. They are nocturnal in habits and live in or near the borders of forests, in thickets of weeds or brushwood, and in meadows adjoining woodland areas or forest lakes. In prairie country they occupy belts of woody growth bordering streams. In congenial locations they range from sea level up to an altitude of 8,000 feet or more.
For winter homes they dig burrows two or three feet deep, in the lower parts of which they excavate oval chambers and fill them with fine grass and other soft material to make a warm nest. Other chambers opening from these burrows serve as store-rooms for berries, seeds, and nuts of various kinds, among which beechnuts are a favorite.
The nests occupied as summer homes are placed in shallow burrows a few inches below the surface of the ground, or they may be in a hollow tree, under a piece of bark, in a dense tussock of grass, or in other makeshift shelter. In these nests the young, varying from two to eight in number, are born at varying times between May and September, indicating the probability that more than one litter is produced each season.