Rut (animal)

“ It is common to find well-beaten paths from the animal’s “front door” to the forage areas. Moving about on a grassy slope the fat, lazy rodent seems anything but alert, as he crawls from one spot to another. But the observer soon becomes aware that the chuck’s pauses to survey the landscape are frequent; his head is raised, if no danger threatens his tail flips and feeding is resumed. If frightened, swift retreat is generally preceded by the shrill whistle, and the sluggish, crawling fat one becomes a scurrying bundle of fur following a well-worn and familiar route to the sanctuary of his den. ”

“ Among a number of such failures two or three may be briefly cited here: you cannot persuade a countryman that a slow-worm is not a snake, that all snakes are not poisonous and to be killed at sight, and that the comparatively inoffensive rodent now to be described is not a rat and of rat-like nature. The name of Water Rat is general as a true folk-name.
The Voles are of heavier build than the Rats, the head is shorter, thicker, and the muzzle rounded instead of being [Pg 103] pointed; the limbs are shorter and the hairy tail is not much more than half the length of the head and body. ”

“ Mice and the black and roof rats produce smaller litters, but the period of gestation, about 21 days, and the number of litters are the same for all.
Rats and mice are practically omnivorous, feeding upon all kinds of animal and vegetable matter. The brown rat makes its home in the open field, the hedge row, and the river bank, as well as in stone walls, piers, and all kinds of buildings. It destroys grains when newly planted, while growing, and in the shock, stack, mow, crib, granary, mill, elevator, or ship's hold, and also in the bin and feed trough. ”

“ It was a foot beyond the normal take-off of the grown rat. He flung his head round, put all the force he possessed into his hind legs, and leapt, upwards and backwards, towards the shelf. He caught it with his fore-paws, scrambled on to it, and, for the moment, was safe. He was only just quick enough. As his eyes turned, the brown rats had rushed forward, and, even as he clutched the ledge, he heard them pattering against the wall.
The floor below was a raging sea of rats; rats leaping over one another, jostling, biting, tearing. ”

“ As soon as the Turtle is struck, the wooden handle separates from the peg, in consequence of the looseness of its attachment. The smart of the wound urges on the animal as if distracted, and it appears that the longer the peg remains in its shell, the more firmly fastened it is, so great a pressure is exercised upon it by the shell of the Turtle, which, being suffered to run like a whale, soon becomes fatigued, and is secured by hauling in the line with great care. In this manner, as the pilot informed me, eight hundred Green Turtles were caught by one man in twelve months. ”

“ The black rat sat back on his haunches, pricked up his ears, and listened. It was something different to the faint lapping wash of the sewer; different to the dull hum of the traffic. It was an uncanny, unfamiliar scratching.
Every rat knows the scratching of his relations; but the black rat had no relations. ”

“ The rat in the Rocky mountain on it's West side are like those on the upper part of the Missouri in and near those mountains and have the distinguishing trait of possessing a tail covered with hair like other parts of the body; one of those we caught at the White bear Islands in the beginning of July last and was then discribed. I have seen the nests of those in this neighbourhood but not the animal. I think it most probable that they are like those of the Atlantic states or at least the native rat of our country which have no hair on the tail. ”

“ This notorious mountain rat is widely distributed over the state from 4,600 feet up to the tops of the highest peaks. Often frequenting buildings and cabins in the mountains, the pack rat has also been labeled a trade rat. These names are derived from the animal’s habit of carrying off any loose article it may find and sometimes leaving other objects in the place of those taken. While these rats do possess a distinct musky odor, they, like many of the other rodents, have unduly suffered in character by comparison with the universally disliked house rat. ”

“ Another sub-species, the Tree or Roof Rat (E. rattus frugivorus) , common in the Mediterranean region, often appears in our ports. It has long, soft and dense fur, of light grey or brown on the upper parts and whitish below (pure white to pale yellow) , and the feet usually white above.
The Black Rat is more of a climber than a burrower; more cleanly in its feeding than its brown rival. The pink-skinned young are born without fur, sight, or hearing. ”

“ But it will not do to pass by the smaller ones, those used for sport or for house service. Chief among the small sporting breeds are the active Terriers, all of them brave, alert and quick in motion. These are used in hunting such small prey as the otter, the badger, the weasel and the rat. To see one of them at work in a room full of rats is to look upon a living flash of lightning. A single Rat Terrier has been known to kill a hundred rats, collected in one room, in seven minutes, one quick bite putting each rat out of business. ”

“ The thumb of the forefeet is reduced to a mere tubercle.
Although the Rats have much to do with garbage and offensive matters, they take the greatest of care to maintain their own cleanliness and a spruce appearance, spending much of their time in cleaning their fur and paws. One of the reasons for regretting the possible extirpation of the Black Rat by his more pushful relative, was, no doubt, his less ferocious ways and well-known milder disposition—a trait which is obvious to any one who has handled the domesticated albino, or White Rat, which is generally considered to be of this species. ”

“ Fish, flesh, fowl, or vegetable, crustacean or mollusc—anything that can be digested—is eaten by them; and if all else fails they will eat their own kin. In this matter [Pg 97] the Brown Rat, from his superior size and ferocity, has the advantage, as is emphasised by an incident told by a professional rat-catcher to Frank Buckland. He said that having had a successful haul in infested premises he had turned all his captures both Black and Brown into a large wire cage, intending to have a little sport next day with a few cronies and a terrier or two. ”

“ When a worm is suddenly illuminated and dashes like a rabbit into its burrow—to use the expression employed by a friend—we are at first led to look at the action as a reflex one. The irritation of the cerebral ganglia appears to cause certain muscles to contract in an inevitable manner, independently of the will or consciousness of the animal, as if it were an automaton. ”

“ The moose will perhaps one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns,—a sort of fucus or lichen in bone,—to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this! ”

“ To prevent the weaker members of the community from being preyed upon by innumerable vultures, it was needful that there should be an animal of prey stronger than the rest, commissioned to keep them down. But as the king of the vultures would be no less bent upon preying on the flock than any of the minor harpies, it was indispensable to be in a perpetual attitude of defence against his beak and claws. ”

“ They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature. Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself and lived, and at no expense of the spirit. ”

“ Nevertheless, how many hearts with warm red blood in them are beating under cover of the woods, and how many teeth and eyes are shining! A multitude of animal people, intimately related to us, but of whose lives we know almost nothing, are as busy about their own affairs as we are about ours: beavers are building and mending dams and huts for winter, and storing them with food; ”

“ I had a tame rat when I was a boy, and I loved that animal as only a boy would love an old water-rat; ”

“ As I was sitting at the window of the boat, looking out on the river, I saw, all of a sudden, an odd-looking bird making its way through the water to the opposite bank, followed by a great commotion. I found it was a domestic fowl which had managed to escape impending doom in the galley by jumping overboard and was now trying frantically to win across. It had almost gained the bank when the clutches of its relentless pursuers closed on it, and it was brought back in triumph, gripped by the neck. I told the cook I would not have any meat for dinner.
I really must give up animal food. ”

“ There is no courtesy or kindness in the nature of the rat; no nesting bird is safe from his attacks, unless her home is beyond his reach in some cleft of a rock that he cannot scale or in some fork of a tree that he cannot climb. He is a cannibal—even the young and the sick of his own kind become the victims of his rapacious hunger—and he will eat almost anything, living or dead, from the refuse in a garbage heap to the dainty egg of a willow-wren in the tiny, domed nest amid the briars at the margin of the river. ”

“ A [182] horde of bedraggled rats got through the surf and scurried into the hiding of the grass-roots. They promptly made themselves at home, burrowing under the grass and beneath old half-buried timbers, and carrying panic into the ranks of the mice and shrews. When the storm was over, the cat had a decided surprise in her first long hunting expedition. Something had rustled the grass heavily, and she trailed it, expecting a particularly large fat marsh-mouse. When she pounced and alighted upon an immense old ship’s rat, many-voyaged and many-battled, she got badly bitten. ”

“ Nevertheless the student of development finds, not only that the chick commences its existence as an egg, primarily identical, in all essential respects, with that of the Dog, but that the yelk of this egg undergoes division—that the primitive groove arises, and that the contiguous parts of the germ are fashioned, by precisely similar methods, into a young chick, which, at one stage of its existence, is so like the nascent Dog, that ordinary inspection would hardly distinguish the two.
The history of the development of any other vertebrate animal, Lizard, Snake, Frog, or Fish, tells the same story. ”

“ There is the foreigner, the invader, the common brown rat, who is accursed; there is the old English black rat, whom the accursed one has nearly wiped out into little more than a ghost; and there is the water-rat, who is not a rat, but a vole, and would thank you to remember the fact.
And this rat was a black rat, as black as jet, shark-jawed, star-eyed, elfin-eared, snake-tailed, lean, long-legged, and graceful—a very greyhound among the rats. He was there, in that dancing-floor of the winds by the estuary, because no common or sewer rats were there. ”

“ WATER RAT. These Rats lie always by the waterside, and feed chiefly on grass and vegetables, eating neither flesh or corn, but they will devour green peas, when in season, if there are any growing near the ditches where they lie; these vermin do not much mischief, except in making holes in banks and spoiling fences; they make kennels or holes by the side of ditches, very much resembling those of the otter, for they have one way out in the water, and another way out by land, in order to escape from their enemies, which ever way pursued. ”

“ At times a rat would sneak out of the grass, slink across our path and disappear in the water, again; a lonely bird would rise into the air and cry piteously as it flew away, and ever, loud and insistent, threatening and terrible, the shells would fly over our heads, yelling out their menace of pain, of sorrow and death as they flew along. ”

“ For a time no sign of a living creature was visible; then a brown rat crept along the bank beneath my hiding place; a dim form, which from its size I concluded was that of Lutra, the otter, crossed a spit of sand about a dozen yards above the reed-bed, where a moonbeam glanced through the alders; and a big brown owl, silhouetted against the sky, flew silently up-stream, and perched on a low, bare branch of a Scotch fir beside the grass-grown path. ”

“ At this time, also, the plump, cream-coloured larvæ of the stone-fly in the shallows were growing within their well cemented caddis-cases and preparing for maturity. So the trout fattened on caddis-grubs and flies, and the otter-cub, in corresponding measure, became sleek, well-grown, and spirited.
In the winter Lutra had imperceptibly acquired the habit of swimming and diving across-stream, just as an old fox, when hunting in the woods, quarters his ground systematically across-wind, and so detects the slightest scent that may be wafted on the breeze. Nature had been specially kind to her ”

“ Many animals snuggle together for warmth in bitter weather—as the squirrels and the rats. Those who go ratting in hedges and dells in the winter know they may try a dozen freshly used burrows without finding a rat—when suddenly from a single hole the rats will come pouring out in a stream of fur. Twenty or more rats will lie together in one hole. They are clever enough to block up a hole on the windward side to keep out the draught—so that a rat-hole newly stopped with soil, turnip leaves, or grass, is almost certain indication that rats are within. ”

“ The trap is gone and for ten minutes we hunt carefully over every inch of ground. Finally my wife discovers it fifteen feet away and stifles a scream for in it, caught by the neck and still alive, is a huge rat nearly two feet long; it too is a species which may prove new.
When the last trap has been examined, we follow the trail to the edge of the forest and into the clearing where the tents glow in the darkness like great yellow pumpkins. ”