Wood rat

“ The agility of the wood rat was demonstrated near Wallula where we watched a specimen by the light of a flashlight as it climbed an almost vertical rock wall, taking advantage of small fractures for toe-holds.
Wood rats are far from noiseless in their nocturnal activities. Near Moses Coulee, Douglas County, wood rats were heard from a distance of 50 feet as they scampered back and forth through a concrete culvert under the highway.
Many species of wood rats build complicated stick houses in which they live. In Washington, elaborate stick houses are sometimes built but are usually not occupied. ”

“ The wood rat is a very clean animal, of no relation to the common barn rat except in superficial resemblance. A vegetarian in diet he lives on green vegetation such as grass and foliage, fruit, bark, roots, fungi, seeds and nuts. He is active all year but seldom accumulates much of a store of winter food.
Mainly nocturnal in habit, they are, however, occasionally seen in the daytime. Their principal enemies here are hawks, owls, weasels, coyotes and martens.
The young, from three to six in a litter, are born in June or July and are duller in color than the parents. ”

“ They are said to have come originally from Asia. There is one species of rat, however, that is much larger than either of these—the Gigantic rat, found in Indian countries, and which in size quite equals a rabbit!
The habits of the rats are too well-known to require description. Some—as the Wood Rat and Florida Rat of America—dwell apart from the habitations of man, in the woods; where, instead of living in burrows, they construct large nests, by collecting together heaps of sticks, leaves, and grass. ”

“ Therefore I think the best place you could select to set up the trap would be somewhere where there is no kind of cover, no grass, nor anything, where it is quite bare and open, and where the rat would run along quickly and never think of any danger. And he would be sure to run much faster and not stay to look under his feet in crossing such places, lest Pan should see him and give chase, or your papa should come round the corner with a gun. Now I know there is one such place the rat passes every evening ”

“ Now the rat hated this mouse because he lived so near, and helped himself to so much food, and being so much smaller, he could get about inside the house where you live, Bevis, without being seen, and so got very fat, and made the rat jealous. He thought, too, that when the weasel had eaten the wife and the babies, that he would be strong enough to go away. Presently the weasel came down from his meal, and looked so fierce and savage that the rat, strong as he was, was still more anxious to get rid of him as quickly as possible. ”

“ Every sportsman has an attendant who follows the party, and, as soon as his master has discharged an arrow, picks it up and returns it to him.
In order to attract their game, the sportsmen imitate the squeaking of a rat, which often has the effect of bringing them out of their holes, and if a rat should run away instead of waiting to be shot, one or two of them, with a sharp percussion of the tongue, utter another sound, which has the effect of making the rat stop and sit up to listen. The party that shoots ten rats first wins the game. Birds of any kind are counted as rats. ”

“ Large piles of cut stove wood on many northern farms become rat infested. The same is true of manure piles adjoining barns and, to a lesser extent, of hay and straw stacks near farm buildings. These do not provide food and are attractive to rats for harbors only if near a source of food supply; moving them to a place at some distance from where foodstuffs are handled will usually solve the problem. ”

“ The old-fashioned professional rat-catcher is seen as rarely as the mole-catcher, with his rude traps of wood, wire and string, actuated by a spring of green wood from the hedgerow. And with the rat-catcher have passed the secrets of his calling—how, when and where to use oils and essences to attract rats to their doom. He knew how to handle rats alive with his naked hands, and the trick of squeezing the life from their bodies. The experienced take rats by the back of the throat, but unless the grip is made in just the right way a dangerous bite may be received. ”

“ Adults are brownish gray above with white underparts and a gray tail. Young individuals have blue-gray upper-parts.
Wood rats range over most of North America. They exhibit great variation, especially in the southwestern United States. The bushy-tailed species occurs in the western United States and Canada. Wood rats are notorious for invading buildings in the mountains and in the desert. However, their natural habitat is broken rock or talus. This habitat preference accounts for their distribution in Washington, for talus is common except in the humid subdivision of the Transition Life-zone. ”

“ However ill the rat served the mouse, however much he abused his superior strength, wreaking his temper on his weaker companion, still the mouse clung to him all the more. On the other hand the rat, ready enough to injure the mouse himself, would allow no one else (unless with his permission) to touch his follower, wishing to reserve to himself a monopoly of tyranny.
So soon as the stoat was out of sight, the fox looked round to see that no one was near, and he said to a fly: "Fly, will you carry a message for me?" ”

“ Across the waste ground crawled the canal that started in the clean green-brown country; here it ran between a clammy grassless towing path and a brick wall. “Ran” is too jocund a word to describe its action. It crept stickily along, a slimy glaze coating its surface, whereon floated the hairless swollen body of a drowned rat.
Ralph Campion stood at the side of the black canal, and looked at the sheer drop of the brick work. ”

“ Any one can see a rabbit, a hare, or even a rat; but to see a Field-mouse is not easy, even when the little creatures are present in thousands. A Field-mouse never shows itself except from necessity, its instinct teaching it to escape the observation of its many furred and feathered enemies. Short-legged and soft-furred, it threads its noiseless way among the herbage with such gentle suppleness that scarcely a grass-blade is stirred, while, if it should be forced to pass over a spot of bare ground, the red-brown hue of its fur prevents it from being detected by an inexperienced eye. ”

“ ‘Where it’s all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn’t, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud-drift?’
‘Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,’ said the Rat. ‘And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. ”

“ The miserable weasel cried and sniffed, and sniffed and cried, till by-and-by he heard the rat come back and begin to scratch outside. Presently the rat stopped, and was going away again, when the weasel begged and prayed him not to leave him to die there in the dark.
"'Very well,' said the rat, 'I will send the cricket to sing to you. In a day or two you will see the chink get bigger, and meantime you can eat your tail; and as you will get very thin, you will be able to creep through a very small hole and get out all the quicker. ”

“ The Mole-rat does not keep itself quite so jealously secluded as does our common Mole, but occasionally will come out of the burrow and lie on the ground, enjoying the warm sunshine. Still it is not easily to be approached; for though its eyes are almost useless, the ears are so sharp, and the animal is so wary, that at the sound of a footstep it instantly seeks the protection of its burrow, where it may bid defiance to its foes. ”

“ In color the European lemming is blackish brown above and yellowish white below, while its length is about six inches.
Various kinds of rodents known as lemmings are found in North America. The Hudson Bay lemming has a thick, warm fur. Eskimo children use lemming-skins to make clothes for their dolls.
Rats
The brown rat and the black rat, of course, are only too common everywhere. They seem to have come in the first place from Asia, and have spread to almost all parts of the world. ”

“ Had it not been for this he would not have faced so terrible a tempest, but to see the rat in torture he would have gone through anything. As he crept along a furrow, not far outside the copse, choosing that route that he might be somewhat sheltered in the hollow from the wind, he saw a wire which a poacher had set up, and stayed to consider how he could turn it to his advantage.
"There is Ulu, the hare," he said to himself, "who lives in the wheat-field ”

“ 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. ”

“ Up above, in the open air, they are to be seen in swarms sharing our watchfulness. This gun-shaken valley is honeycombed with their little round funk-holes, into which they flash at any sudden noise. It is merely going downstairs where we are all at home.
The social instincts of the rat are less highly developed. His visible visits to the mess are rarer, but we overhear his conversation in his tunnels that open on our shelves, the patter of his pink feet across the canvas overhead, and the muscular squirming of his body in some tight place about the sandbag wainscot. ”

“ I must tell my readers, especially those having large shops, etc., that it is a good plan, if possible, to turn off the gas and water every night and week-end, for I have seen a good many cases where the Rats in the night-time have eaten through a water-pipe, and the place has been flooded by morning. It is just the same with a gas-pipe, and my opinion is that it is quite possible for fires to be caused by Rats in the night-time. Rats are very fond of nibbling and scratching at soft wood, and p. ”

“ To a greater degree than any other kind of mammal on this area woodrats show intraspecific intolerance. On various occasions when captives were placed in the same or adjacent cages, they focused their attention on each other with evident hostility, the more powerful or aggressive individuals attacking or pursuing. Several times the confinement of two rats in the same live-trap or cage resulted in the death of the weaker individual, and seemingly this is the normal outcome unless the attacked rat is able to escape. ”

“ Usually the rats can be caught in traps only at their houses or nearby places that they frequent, as indicated by their sign. When travelling, woodrats make use of overhead cover as much as possible. Storing of food seems to be associated with the animal's reluctance to wander far from home. When a rat is gathering preferred food for storage the home range may be enlarged (or the animal may travel beyond the limits of its regular home range) . In any case the rat may find it necessary to traverse an additional area in order to reach the food source. ”

“ Food of the eastern woodrat consists chiefly of vegetation; many kinds of leaves, fruits, and seeds are eaten. For many individuals foliage and seeds of the osage orange are the staple; hedge rows and dense trees of osage orange provide favorable sites for the houses. Woodrats are attracted to meat baits, and have been known to feed on flesh of carcasses, even on one of the pilot black snake which is a predator on the rat. ”

“ The place was scarcely worth living in, so infested was it with these rats. The people found them in their breeches or petticoats when they put on their clothes in the morning, and it was nothing unusual to discover a rat’s nest in one’s shoes or pockets, or in one’s Sunday hat or bonnet.
The rats were great black creatures that ran boldly through the streets in broad daylight, and swarmed all over the houses. There was not a barn, or a cornrick, or a storeroom, or a cupboard, but they gnawed their way into it. ”

“ Usually a trail leads to a bush or tree showing evidence of heavy use by the rat. Ordinarily such a trail cannot be traced more than 30 feet from the house, and it seems that the most concentrated foraging occurs within this short radius. Experience in live-trapping has indicated that the distance covered by a woodrat in its normal foraging for food is ordinarily less than 75 feet in any direction from the house. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For centuries the house mouse has been parasitic about the habitations of man, and in many places in America has spread into the surrounding country, where it holds its own in the struggle for existence with many of our native species. It is probable that its ability to live in houses also infested by the fierce brown rat is due wholly to its agility, and to the small size, which enables it to retreat through crevices too small for the rat. ”