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inexpensiveprogress · 3 years

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Stack Dwellers

Below is an artical by the Earl of Cranbrook for the Shell Magazine ‘Land’, in volume 12, 1962. It was illustrated with drawing by John Nash and photos by Geoffrey Kinns. The ‘Land’ booklets were large and colourful, illustrated by famous artists and designed by the typographer John Lewis.

I remember an old man in my Village telling me when I was young that the inhabitants of a neighbouring village were ‘that backward they call meece meezen’. Outside that backward parish, when a late threshed stack in Suffolk was overrun with mice, it was said to be ‘full of everlasting meece’ in fact, for those who don’t use combines today, it still may be, if it is not full of rats. In my experience you don’t find many mice in a stack that is full of rats or many rats in a mouse-infested one.

It may be because the rats eat young mice or that the two species are mutually antipathetic. Be that as it may, the mice you find in stacks are not ‘country mice’ but ‘town mice’, not field mice but ordinary house mice which live on and with man almost throughout the world. I say ‘almost’ because there are places which man has reached but which the house mouse has not. House mice cannot live in competition with field mice in the open or field mice in competition with house mice in habitations. When the island of St Kilda was evacuated, there were house mice living in the crofts and field mice in the open. But, deprived of man on whose stores of grain, food, etc. they lived, the house mice disappeared when the human inhabitants left and are now extinct.

The field mice are still there. Another island off the west coast of Scotland, evacuated some 20 years before St Kilda, had no field mice, only house mice. Though deprived of the support of men, there was no competition from field mice; so the house mice were able to colonize the whole island and came back into the deserted crofts when these were reoccupied by a party of visiting naturalists many years later. House mice, therefore, can travel from place to place only with man and his goods. I know an isolated croft on the west coast of Scotland approachable only by rowing boat: there is no pier, the mail boat has to lie off and a sack of coal and other stores are tumbled into a rowing boat to be taken ashore. No house mouse could hide itself in that little load, and the local field mice come into that croft to eat the cheese in the larder. In townships with a pier, when a large boat with ample accommodation for mice can lie alongside overnight, you find house mice in the houses.

As most of us know to our shame when we have left a stack too long, the mouse population can build up to enormous numbers. It has, of course, unlimited food and shelter from its enemies: nature does the rest. In these slum conditions the female mice seem to lose all sense of decency. Normally, mice have fairly strong ‘territorial instincts’, each male defending his own territory and each female her own nest. But, in the overcrowded conditions which exist at the bottom of a stack, one finds communal nests with litters of every age from naked new born babies to three-quarter grown fullyhaired adolescents. Mice kept in captivity, with unlimited food and in a high tier of intercommunicating nest boxes with runs, seem to develop a sort of hierarchical ‘peckorder’. At the top of the tier are found the most successful, one to each nest box, fighting to preserve their own territory against interlopers from below. Half way down are the middle classes, slightly overcrowded but, in their turn, resisting climbers from the grossly overcrowded slum at the bottom. There, two, three and even more females have to share the same box.

Curiously enough, if the inhabitants of the uppermost nest boxes are removed, there are a few days of fighting and a new peck-order develops: after the revolution a new race of aristocrats ensconces itself in comfortable exclusiveness in the place of the old. It is some years since I saw a mouse-infested stack but my recollection is that, as the sheaves were thrown onto the platform of the drum, one found a very similar picture. Half way down, the Erst mice appeared and an occasional individual nest; it wasn’t until one got towards the bottom of the stack that one found mice in scores or hundreds and communal nests. Another mouse which is not uncommon in stacks, especially stacks of cocksfoot or other grasses harvested for seed, is the harvest mouse. Very small, with bodies about two-thirds the size of a man’s little finger and with long tails, these mice vary very much in colour from a bright foxy red to a reddish brown. In my part of the world. they are often called ‘red rannies’ ‘Ranny’ is a shrew but they are like the long-nosed shrews only in size.

Their noses are, in fact, shorter and rounder than those of house mice and field mice. Conventionally animals of cornfields, the same picture of harvest mice climbing on stalks of wheat is reproduced in nature book after nature book. In fact they seem to be much more animals of the water side, living as much in rough overgrown meadows and grassy scrub by streams as on arable land. 'l‘heir nests are found at the base of reeds in fen ditches and I have known them in young plantations and far out on salt marshes. Harvest mice are often said to be much less common than they used to be indeed, this has been said for generations, and the sail reaper, binder and combine have all been blamed in turn. In fact each in turn has, I suspect, been indirectly responsible for this statement. The man with a scythe saw more harvest mouse nests than the man on the reaper, the man who tied the sheaves behind more than the man on the binder and I certainly haven‘t seen a harvest mouse in a stack since I had a combine. I can, though, usually catch one in a rough grassy poplar plantation by the river ifI want to. A harvest mouse quickly becomes tame if kept in captivity and makes an entrancing pet.

It is the only British animal that uses its tail as an extra hand, Curling it round a twig or corn stalk as it climbs about. It is rats, though, which remind one of the halcyon days when the dogs lay panting, too exhausted to do more than snap at the last rats which ran from the stack bottom as it was turned over, and one looked ruel‘ully at one’s palms, blistered by the sharp edges ofa thatching spick pulled from the roof at the beginning of the day. Overcrowding amongst rats has the same effect as amongst mice communal nests and the like but rats are less ‘territorial’ than mice. It is said that you can put your hand into a sackful of rats, huddled peacefully together, without getting bitten but I have never got beyond the point of thinking it might be an interesting experiment to try. Rats are comparative new-comers to this country, first reaching Europe from the East in the middle ages. Certainly the Romans had no word for ‘rat’ though they had one for ‘mouse’: the scientific name ‘Rattus’ is an artificial latinized form of the French ‘Rat’. Be that as it may, however and whenever they came, rats are an unmitigated pest. Inere isn’t much excuse, though, today for being overrun with rats. It was an uphill struggle all the way with traps, dogs, ferrets, nux vomica and extract of squills. With the new poison Warfarin, it’s a different story. It is often said that rye, producing bread corn from the poorest soils, is the greatest gift of God to man.

Warfarin and myxomatosis are close rivals. I have said that these stack dwellers have shelter from their enemies, but weasels come pretty often into stacks and breed there amidst an abundance of food on the hoof. In most parts of England indeed on the continent of Europe too many countrymen maintain that there are two sorts of weasel, the ordinary weasel and the ‘mouse hunt’. The latter is said to be smaller than the ordinary weasel and to be the one which is most frequently found in stacks. In fact, weasels are one of those animals in which the males are always much larger than the females: an average male is about a foot from nose to tail tip, an average female 8 9 inches. I have had a number of ‘mouse hunts’ sent to me as a locally known disbeliever in the existence of two species of weasel. With one exception, they have all been females, the exception being a normal male weasel 12 inches long. I never allow weasels to be killed, so have never examined one from a stack. But, from the fact that nests of young weasels are not uncommon in stacks, would expect that most stack dwelling weasels are females. In any case, weasels or mouse hunts, I would sooner have a stackful of weasels than a stackful of mice and rats: with owls and kestrels they are the best friends a farmer or forester can have, killing large numbers of rats, mice and voles _ and any rat killer is a good friend to a game preserver. I must confess that I sometimes regret my combine and am sorry for the boys of tomorrow who will never run after rats as they come from a stack or have the opportunity of studying the habits of the common, but none-the-less interesting. animals which infest it.

#John Nash #Shell Mex #Photography

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