Field Notes––

Give Me Shelter — Tails For A Long Winter’s Night

By Dottie Evans

In the evening if the TV is off, you might hear faint scratchings and scufflings.

And you might notice the dog lounging over by the radiator who becomes suddenly focused upon a certain section of bare baseboard.

Ears forward and eyes down he follows his nose, snuffling loudly. He wags his tail in avid excitement about capturing whatever it is that hides behind your living room wall.

Clearly, you’ve got a mouse in the house — most likely the white-footed variety — and you might as well learn to live with it until spring when it will surely head back outside to the fields and woods from where it came.

A white-footed mouse is not such a bad guest, really. He is bigger than the chunky, charcoal-gray house mouse that leaves its traveling cards behind whenever it raids your kitchen counter. He’s got cute big eyes, big ears, and a very long tail with soft, white underfur and a glossy chestnut-to-gray coat above.

Actually, the white-footed mouse is not even interested in what you’ve got in your breadbox. Rather, he’s a hoarder of what he finds outside, storing grain and seeds in a stash nearby his winter hideaway. His nest is a round ball made from leaves, dried grass, feathers, hair (probably contributed by your dog), sticks, insulation — whatever he can find that will keep the babies warm.

Yes, there will be a Mrs White-Footed Mouse, as well, and babies to follow, because mice need only six weeks in between breeding cycles that go on pretty much continuously all year long.

When cold weather comes, we know they will begin their mass migration into warm, protected places like barns, tree stumps, birdhouses, garages, garden sheds — wherever they can hole up, store food, make a nest, raise a few litters, and survive winter.

Peromyscus leucopus is a ground-dwelling, outdoor-loving creature. He’s also an acrobat, adept at climbing trees, drainpipes and birdhouse poles, and he will he construct his warm winter nest in the oddest places. Since you never know when or where you’ll come across one of these nests, you might pause before disturbing it — as I once neglected to do several years ago when removing the straw from our pet rabbit’s hutch.

And herein lies another story for a long winter’s night.

Our family rabbit, whose all-purpose name was Snickers (because we could never decide whether it was a girl or boy) had finally died, and several months after the fact I was cleaning its outdoor hutch. When you have small children underfoot, it takes a long time to get around to such things.

 I say “finally” because when this rabbit was first given to my youngest son by his grandmother, we were told it would “only live two or three years, at best.” Nearly 12 years later the rabbit was still alive, happily ensconced in its capacious hutch under a Norway maple in the corner of the dog’s pen. Every time I peeled a carrot or chopped celery, the rabbit got the shavings and I can’t cut up a carrot today without thinking of it.

Snickers died of old age and possibly heat stroke one August day long after this same youngest son had gone off to college. That’s how we learned that rabbits like cold weather best, though the struggle to keep its water from freezing was always a challenge.

But I digress. Back to the white-footed mouse I surprised in Snickers’ long-vacated bed of straw. I’ll never forget watching it carry its tiny, pink, blind and helpless babies one by one out of the hutch and down a supporting post into the pachysandra by the garage where the entire mouse family eventually disappeared from my view.

Focused and efficient, the white-footed mouse paid little attention to me, but devoted all of its energy to transporting the next generation out of harm’s way. I’ve seldom witnessed such urgency combined with dedication to task.

“Gimme shelter,” sang Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.

When the wind blows cold and the wolf is at the door, we all need a safe place to hide.