Collins New Naturalist Library. L. Matthews Harrison

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СКАЧАТЬ Family Muridae

      The mice and rats differ from the voles in having proportionally larger ears and eyes, more pointed snouts, and longer tails. The cheek teeth differ in having low crowns with cusps. We have three indigenous and one introduced species of mouse, and two introduced rats.

      The wood mouse, Apodemus sylvaticus, brownish yellow above and nearly white below, often with a coloured spot on the chest, was formerly called the ‘Long-tailed Field mouse’. It lives wherever there is cover, especially in woodlands and hedgerows and consequently is found throughout the British Isles and off-lying islands into many of which it was probably accidentally introduced by man. A large number of subspecies has been described none of which are now held to be valid. Although primarily vegetarian the diet is very varied and includes many small invertebrates.

      A. flavicollis, the yellow-necked mouse, closely resembles the wood mouse but is larger and has a yellow band across the chest joining the colour of the upper side. It is found in many parts of England south of the Humber, and in Wales, but is absent elsewhere. It lives in similar places to the wood mouse, but more frequently comes into houses in autumn and winter. It was not recognised as a member of the British fauna until 1894.

      The harvest mouse, Micromys minutus, is the smallest British rodent. Gilbert White of Selborne, the first naturalist to note its presence in England, wrote in 1768¹⁵² that he found two of them just counterbalanced ‘one copper halfpenny, which is about the third of an ounce avoirdupois’ or six to the ounce – they must have been thin mice for the average weight is about 6.0 grams or just over four to the ounce. The fur of the upper parts of the harvest mouse is bright reddish yellow and of the underside white. The nose is rather blunt, the hairy ear rather small, and the tail is prehensile. Harvest mice live among tall ground plants such as long grass and rough herbage among the stems of which they climb to seek their food and where they make globular breeding nests in summer up to about two feet above ground; in winter they live among the litter below. They are found, sometimes in abundance, throughout most of England and much of Wales, but are absent from the greater part of Scotland and the whole of Ireland.

      The house mouse, Mus domesticus*, has dull brownish grey fur, slightly lighter below, occasionally much lighter. Unlike the other mice it has an unpleasant smell resembling that of acetamide. It is found wherever there are human habitations throughout the British Isles, feeding upon and spoiling man’s stored foods. It also occurs in hedgerows and fields away from buildings. It was introduced from the continent, no doubt unintentionally, about 2,000 years ago. Both the British species of rat are introduced, the ship or black rat about 900, and the brown or common rat about 250 years ago.

      The ship rat, Rattus rattus, is commonly black in colour, but also occurs as two other forms, brown with grey underside or brown with nearly white underside. It was once widespread but is now found, with few exceptions, solely in the neighbourhood of sea ports, where it lives only in buildings.

      The common rat, Rattus norvegicus, is larger than the ship rat and has comparatively smaller eyes and ears; the fur is greyish brown, lighter beneath. It lives in buildings of all sorts but also inhabits rubbish tips and hedgerows far from them. In addition it commonly lives in the open on the coast, especially on the shores of estuaries and salt marshes. It is found throughout the British Isles and off-lying islands, having replaced the once abundant ship rat. Charles Waterton, the early nineteenth century naturalist of Wakefield, expressed¹⁵⁰ his extreme Jacobin loyalty by calling the common rat the ‘Hanoverian rat’ because it was introduced soon after King George I’s accession in 1714 – a name that was sometimes used by other writers.

       Family Gliridae

      Our only native member of this family is the dormouse, Muscardinus avellanarius, distinguished by its orange-brown fur, long whiskers, and hairy, almost bushy tail. It lives in broad-leaved woodlands, coppices and overgrown hedgerows, building a globular nest of bark fibre, grass, and leaves several feet, sometimes yards, above ground among shrubs. Apart from the bats the dormouse and the hedgehog are the only indigenous British mammals that hibernate; the winter nest is usually made underground or among litter at ground level. The dormouse occurs sparsely throughout England and Wales, becoming scarcer in the north, and is absent from Scotland and Ireland. Another member of the family, the fat dormouse, Glis glis, was introduced at Tring in Hertfordshire in 1902, and has since persisted and spread over a small area of the Chiltern Hills. It closely resembles a small grey squirrel, but has dark rings round the eyes. It inhabits woods, orchards and gardens, and, like the common dormouse, it hibernates, often in the roofs of houses.

       Family Hystricidae

      The large South American coypu, Myocastor coypus, which produces the fur known commercially as ‘nutria’, escaped from fur farms in the early 1930s and established feral populations in several places, mainly in East Anglia. It is a large aquatic rodent reaching a length of a yard from nose to tail, looking like an enormous brown rat with webbed hind feet, blunt nose, small eyes and ears, and orange coloured enamel on the front of the incisor teeth. In East Anglia the population increased enormously in spite of heavy mortality in severe winters, so that the animals became a pest to agriculture and a threat to the stability of river banks. Since the early 1960s official control measures have greatly reduced its numbers.

      ORDER CETACEA

      Although seventeen species of whales and dolphins have been recorded as British, mainly because they have been found stranded on our coasts from time to time, they cannot be regarded as part of the British fauna as dealt with here – the wreck of a foreign ship on our coasts does not give its crew British nationality or make it part of the native population.

      ORDER CARNIVORA

      Of the ten indigenous species of beasts of prey two have been extinct for centuries; the remaining eight have been joined by a recent introduction derived from animals escaped from fur farms.

       Family Canidae

      The wolf, Canis lupus, was exterminated some 500 years ago in England and Wales, but survived in remote parts of Scotland and Ireland for another 250 years. Its descendent, perhaps with an admixture of other ‘blood’, the domestic dog, has some effect upon the country’s ecology, killing according to one authority¹⁴⁶ some 6,000 sheep a year – in 1978 4,639 were killed and 3,833 injured – and every day depositing 500 tons of dung and a million gallons of urine ‘on Britain’s pavements and parks’, equal to the sewage from four million people.

      On the other hand the fox, Vulpes vulpes, is found everywhere in Great Britain and Ireland and in some of the islands. Its abundance is due to its adaptability to various habitats and foods, to its nocturnal and crepuscular habits, and to its tolerance of the near neighbourhood of man as shown by its recent extension of habitat into the suburbs of towns.

       Family Ursidae

      The brown bear, Ursus arctos, has been extinct in the British Isles for a thousand years; its natural distribution covers all of northern Europe, Asia and America. It varies greatly in size, from the comparatively small European race to the enormous ‘grizzlies’ of Kodiak Island off the Alaskan coast, as large as the ‘Cave bear’ that lived in the British Isles before the last glaciation of the Pleistocene epoch.

       Family Mustelidae

      The family consists of small to medium-sized carnivores, the British species characterised by long bodies and short legs. The pine marten, Martes martes, as large as a rabbit, with deep brown fur, a yellow patch on the throat, and long bushy tail, is an inhabitant of woodlands, where it feeds mainly СКАЧАТЬ