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Red-backed Mouse
Also called: Wood Mouse. Bog Mouse.
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- Length
- 5.60 inches.
- Description
- Ears short, just visible above the fur, about as in the meadow mouse. Colour bright reddish chestnut with numerous black hairs interspersed, sides buffy, below whitish, suffused with buff, feet light gray, tail brown above, gray below. Colours generally darker in summer. In New Brunswick, Ontario, and perhaps elsewhere in the northern part of its range individuals occur which are entirely gray with no trace of the red chestnut colouring. This seems to be a purely dichromatic variety not due to age or sex.
- Range
- Alberta to Quebec and southward to the mountains of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
- Range
- Cold cranberry bogs of Southern New Jersey.
- Range
- Higher Alleghanies, Roan Mt., N. C. to Pennsylvania.
- Range
- Higher slopes of the White Mountains.
- Range
- Wooded regions of Labrador.
- Range
- Ungava, Labrador.
This little mouse is a smaller cousin of the meadow mouse, similar in build but with a longer tail and always recognized by it chestnut colour. Its molar teeth, too, are rooted like those of the false lemming mouse. They are found mainly in woodland clearings, and open bogs, living in runways near the surface, or sometimes in dense patches of grass, and building their nests under a fallen log. The lumbermen of the Alleghanies see them often scurrying away as some fallen tree frightens them from their retreats, or the removal of a pile of bark lays bare their passage ways. To them and to hunters generally these animals are known as wood mice, but the term being used with equal propriety in other parts of the country for the white-footed mouse it becomes ambiguous.
A closely allied variety of red-backed mouse is the most abundant mammal on the Alpine summit of Mount Washington, where it occurs in all sorts of situations, among the rocks, in the moss and in the dwarf willows.
The red-backed mouse of southern New Jersey (E.g. rhoadsi) is an inhabitant exclusively of the cold, damp sphagnum bogs, which intersperse the sandy pine barrens. Here it lives deep down in the sphagnum, sharing the large runways with the meadow mouse, lemming mouse and diminutive shrews. In winter the moss is frequently frozen solid for several inches below the surface, which must force these little rodents to live on such vegetable matter as they have stored away in their subterranean galleries. That either they or their associates are carnivorous at times is evidenced by the partially devoured specimens that the trapper often finds in his traps.
Young red-backed mice lack the rusty red tints and in some of the varieties a gray form of the adult occurs, an exactly parallel case to the red and gray screech owls which are simply dichromatic without relation to sex or age.
Varieties of the Red-backed Mouse
1. Red-backed Mouse. Evotomys gapperi (Vigors).
Description and range as above.
2. New Jersey Red-backed Mouse. E. gapperi rhoadsi Stone.
Darker, with more black hairs above. Teeth heavier.
3. Carolina Red-backed Mouse. E. gapperi carolinensis Merriam.
Larger and darker than E. gapperi, resembling the last.
4. Pallid Red-backed Mouse. E. gapperi ochraceous Miller.
Duller, paler, and more ochraceous than E. gapperi.
5. Labrador Red-backed Mouse. E. proteus Bangs.
Larger than any of the above with longer ears. Paler than E. gapperi and like it in exhibiting a gray phase.
6. Ungava Red-backed Mouse. E. ungava Bangs.
Resembles E. gapperi, but has very small ears and peculiar skull.
Numerous species occur in the Northwest.