Eyes and No Eyes

WILD LIFE IN WOODS AND FIELDS We found one of these nests last summer. It was about as big as a large swan’s egg, and the same shape. We peeped inside and found seven wee little harvest-mice, with, redbrown fur on their backs and white fur underneath.

The shrew is more of a grey colour. But there is one way by which you can always tell a mouse from a shrew.

The mouse has a short snout and four broad white teeth in front. It uses these for gnawing roots and bulbs, and biting the ears of corn.

But the shrew has a long, thin snout, and it Grown teeth are very small and pointed, so that it can kill and eat insects, worms, and snails.

Shrews and mice are both very busy in the evening. We go out sometimes to watch them when the moon is shining. The mice run along so fast out into the field and back to the hedge. Paul says they are carrying seeds and bits of roots into their hole in the bank. For they know that they will want food when they wake up in the winter, and there is none to be found. The shrews move more quietly under the hedge. They push their long snouts into the thick grass, and eat the earwigs and caterpillars.

Both the mice and the shrews are very much afraid of the Barn Owl, which comes out at night and carries them away in her sharp claws to feed her young owls.

Shrews do not store up food, for they sleep in a hole in the bank all the winter through. Then in the spring they line the hole with soft dry grass, and there the mother brings up five or six little shrews.

The mouse, too, burrows deep into the bank. She lays up a nice store of food and goes to sleep. But she often wakes and has a feed, and goes to sleep again. She brings up a great many families in a year. This is why there are many mice.

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