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Plains Pocket Mouse
Images coming soon.
- Length
- 5 inches.
- Description
- External cheek pouches lined with hair opening on either side of the mouth; hair harsh; grayish buff above mixed with dusky white below, sides, ring around eye and spot behind the eye clear buff, feet and legs white.
- Range
- Plains from South Dakota to northern Texas and west to the base of the Rocky Mountains. Numerous other species occur throughout the sandy arid regions of the West from British Columbia to Mexico and California.
- Length
- 9.60 inches.
- Description
- Ochraceous buff above, blackish on the rump. Sides of nose, spot behind each ear and band across the thighs white, under parts white; tail dusky down the middle, above and below, showing white bases to hairs on either side.
- Range
- Western Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Many other species occur through the arid regions of the West.
Very little is known of the life history of the pocket mice, mainly because they are strictly nocturnal in habits and pass the daytime in their burrows in the sandy ground with the openings generally stopped with earth. Like the gophers they carry their food in their curious cheek pouches and store it away in their subterranean granaries.
Ord's Kangaroo Rat
Perodipus ordi (Woodhouse)
This is another nocturnal inhabitant of the sandy plains of the Southwest. It makes an underground nest with numerous communicating passageways, the whole forming a low hillock which easily caves in and which horses and mules familiar with the country have learned to carefully avoid.
Ernest Seton-Thompson gives an interesting account of a nest of this little animal which he investigated. It was situated under the sheltering spines of a bunch of Spanish bayonets and thistles, which guarded effectually from would-be pursuers the nine openings through any one of which the little rat could plunge down to his subterranean dwelling. These openings led to a rather intricate series of passageways opening one into the other in such a way as to lead the intruder to another exit rather than to the nest. The latter he found was reached by a short branch leading from one of the above passageways, the mouth of which was apparently plugged up with earth by the little animal before departing, so as to further shield the nest from any intruders. The nest had a thick felting of fine grass and weed silk and a soft lining of feathers. Two other chambers were filled with over a pint of sunflower seeds and evidently served as storehouses. Of the mouse itself, which Mr. Thompson kept for a time in captivity, he writes: "He was the embodiment of restless energy. Palpitating with life from the tip of his translucent nose and ears to the end of his vibrant tail. He could cross the box at a single bound, and I now saw the purpose of his huge tail. In the extraordinary long flying leaps that Perodipus makes the tuft on the end does for him what the feathers do for an arrow. They keep him straight in the air in his trajectory. . . .
He was the most indefatigable little miner that I ever saw. Those little pinky-white paws, not much larger than a pencil point, seemed never weary of digging, and would send the earth out between his hind legs in little jets like a steam-shovel. He seemed tireless at his work. He first tunnelled the whole mass through and through and I doubt not made and unmade several ideal underground residences and solved many problems of rapid underground transit. Then he embarked in some landscape gardening schemes and made it his nightly business to entirely change the geography of his whole country, laboriously making hills and canyons wheresoever seemed unto him good." Mr. Thompson had reason to suppose that the faint bird-like twitterings sometimes heard at night by cowboys and others on the plains are to be attributed to the Perodipus, being analogous to the songs which are uttered by some individuals of the common house mouse and the white-footed mouse of our woods.