Pennsylvania Game News - June 2023 - 57

Before we grew attuned to mice, the
boys seemed less bothered than we counselors
by the nocturnal scurrying atop
sleeping bags, or by mice gleaning down
from inside tattered pillows, beneath our
sleep-fogged brains. My intimate introduction
came one summer night when
I'd lain still on my bunk while a mouse
scampered toward my bag's open mouth.
I switched on the flashlight I'd stashed and
peered into the unphased stare of what
was likely a deer mouse, its big, limpid,
black eyes set beneath radar-disc ears in
a furry wedge of face.
I wrote " likely a deer mouse " because
that species shares forested habitats in the
Allegheny Mountains with the similar
white-footed mouse. Both are nocturnal,
are agile climbers and consume a varied
diet, which in our camp featured breadcrusts,
spilled cereal and anything the
boys could secret away from the chow
tent to feed their " pets. "
Mice infested our lockers and amassed
nests in neglected boots. They riddled
our library of field guides, cookbooks
and survival manuals. There was no
point in recoiling from them because
they were always at hand. We came to
know these mice as interesting creatures,
supremely fitted to the woods where we
all lived. They could climb, tunnel, thrive
beneath snow or bound atop fresh powder.
Once we understood their opportunistic
approach, we saw their exploitation of
a human encampment plunked down in
their domain as only natural.
It's easy to sense why someone was
moved to name the deer
mouse as they did. Both
it and the white-footed
mouse are rangylooking
animals,
more " leggy " than the
pudgy image we assign
JUNE 2023
to mice. Both are colored like deer, dark
above contrasted by ventral white, and
both have prominent ears they can direct
as they choose. Examine their tracks
across snow. The leaping prints prove
they're proportionally near-equal athletes
to deer.
White-footed and deer mice can be
distinguished by the deer mouse's proportionally
longer (longer than the head
and body combined) and more starkly bicolored
tail. The dorsal surface of a deer
mouse tail is dark, the underside light,
with a crisp division along the midline.
In white-footed mice, that difference in
tail-color is indistinct.
I still live around these two mouse
species. Their nests, crammed with feathers,
milkweed tufts, grass and grapevine
shreds tuck inside watering cans, tarpaper
rolls and under my kayak seat.
I mostly tolerate them except in my
woodpile, where sometimes on a snowy
night I'll extract a wedge of oak to see
white-footed or deer mice scurry from a
cozy refuge. My winter fire is a priority,
so woodpile squatters face eviction.
Our other native mice, the jumping
mice, are less " social " around humans.
If you've seen one, it may have been on
a damp summer night as you drove some
lonely mountain road. If a mouse-size
mammal bounded across the pavement
in your headlights, its long tail streaming
behind, you were privileged to see a
woodland jumping mouse executing its
6-foot hops toward cover. The meadow
jumping mouse, fond of lush fields, is
similar in all ways except habitat preference.
It's
unfortunate that most people's
direct contact with voles is negative. The
widespread meadow vole is best known
for its penchant for girdling young fruit
trees beneath a lingering snowpack. But it
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