Mice have adapted well to living cheek by jowl with humans. They might eat our peas and potatoes, or chew through bags of bird food...
Just over a year ago, my garden was taken over by a young blackbird we called Sid. I had been away for Christmas, and during this time Sid had reclaimed ‘my’ garden as his own.
After my holiday this year I was aware of a similar claim over my garden – this time from a mouse. It seems that while the cat was away, the mouse living in my compost bin moved into the shed to have babies. I came back from my holiday to cold and wintery conditions, and had several glimpses of our mouse scrambling brazenly over the snow to pick up whatever I had left out for the pigeons. She either thought I was still absent, or was too starving to care about the consequences of being seen.
As soon as the snow thawed, I sneaked out to the shed to investigate. I didn’t need to open the door, I could hear the telltale sounds of babies crying for their mother from outside. I've not been in the garden since, and have left the mouse to get on with feeding her babies.
Called wood, or field mice (Apodemus sylvaticus), they do not usually come into our homes, but are often regarded as garden pests. They hamper our efforts at growing peas, sweetcorn, potatoes and spring bulbs, and will chew into bags of bird food and other grains (but in spring they also feast on snails). As their common names suggest, their natural habitats include woodland, grassland and hedgerows. At one time there would have been plenty of those habitats in London, but not now.
Gardens are often the nearest thing our wildlife has to a natural habitat. I’m reminded of War of the Worlds, in which the unnamed narrator describes his reaction to the Martian invasion as no different to those of a rabbit “returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house.” He goes on to describe “a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that [he] was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals”. He felt dethroned by the Martians; I felt dethroned by the blackbird, then the mouse. But the reality is that virtually everything has been dethroned - or at least displaced - by us.
Mice have adapted well to living cheek by jowl with humans. They might eat our peas and potatoes, or chew through bags of bird food, but I think it’s a fair trade off for having to live alongside us. So I’m happy the mouse has found a safe place to nest in my garden. Looking at others in the vicinity (most of which are paved over), I reckon mine provides the nicest habitat possible, for the young wood mice that will never know a wood.
dobby2
17/02/2012 at 17:13
I have a small mouse that lives in my garden too. Now onto several generations of mice, can't be the same one. It lived under my old brick bbq, and would even run around the garden whilst we were out there eating, along behind us, and quite happily while I was gardening. I would feed it also, so it had its only little supply of food so didn't have to compete with the birds. Managed to get a photo of it on my iphone, the mouse standing on the top brick of bbq looking into the patio doors at the cat which was looking at the mouse. Sure the mouse knew it wasn't under threat and that it was taunting the cat!
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