One World

9) Of Wood Mice and Gerbils

Posted 27th February 2016

On my 13th birthday I received two gerbils. The gerbil cage was a large wire cuboid frame attached to a plastic base, which contained the sawdust. There was a little plastic house which was stuffed with cotton wool bedding. Attached to the cage was a wire wheel for them to exercise on.

Over the years, I added various toys for the gerbils to play with. They seemed especially excited by cardboard toilet roll cylinders which they energetically reduced to strips for bedding.

There was an earthenware bowl in the cage, which I made sure always had food in it. Also, I regularly replaced the water in the water bottle which was attached to the cage.

The gerbils would wander out of their little house after a nap, have a few seeds or nuts (sunflower seeds were their favourite), have a good drink of water, then have a play or explore or get to work on chewing something or digging against the side of the base. Later, they'd go back to bed, and snuggle up together, often falling asleep with me watching them from only a few feet away.

During the Summer months, I would sometimes take the cage into the back garden, take off the wire cage from the base, and allow the gerbils to jump out of the base and explore the garden, returning to the cage whenever they wanted to. I always made sure they stayed away from the garden edges where they might escape. Whilst I didn't want to lose my pets, I also suspected they wouldn't survive in the wild.

A few years ago, I caught a little wood mouse in a live trap under my kitchen sink. I had realised it had got into the house a few days previously, and now that I'd caught it I put my plan into action. I placed the live trap containing the tiny mouse onto the plastic base of a plant propagator (a miniature greenhouse for growing seedlings indoors before planting them in the garden). I'd already placed a layer of sawdust in the base, put in a little bowl of mouse food, a little bowl of fresh water, and a small box, with a mouse-sized hole, stuffed with cotton wool bedding. I lifted the lid of the live trap and quickly placed the clear perspex cover onto the plastic base. Then I waited.

After about ten minutes, the wood mouse, a tiny mouse with brown hair, nervously edged out of the trap. It saw the only cover available - the little box with the bedding, and it darted inside. I waited a moment, then slid my hand in under the perspex cover and retrieved the empty live trap. The air holes on the propagator roof were opened, but not so much that the mouse might escape (I didn't know how high it could jump, so I took no chances).

I did all this because it was the beginning of Winter. Perhaps the mouse had come into the house to escape the cold, so I didn't want to re-release it a few miles from my home where it might not find food or shelter. So I decided to look after it over the Winter, and in the meantime I'd try to block any possible access holes around my house.

In the 4 months that that mouse stayed in my living room in that propagator, I only saw it about 4 or 5 times. Each time I saw it it would quickly scurry back into its box. It remained hidden in that little box whenever I was nearby. I knew it was active when I wasn't in the room, because the seeds and nuts in the food bowl were disappearing at a rapid rate. I soon found out that the mouse was taking the food out of the bowl and hiding it deep under a large mound of sawdust it had made. I just let the wood mouse do things its way, and continued to put out food, which disappeared by the next day, presumably having been added to the stockpile hidden under the little mountain of sawdust.

When spring came, I took the propagator into the kitchen again so as to clean it out. I planned to put the nest box with the wood mouse in the basin while I cleaned the base out and replaced the sawdust. Before doing this, I removed the propagator lid and turned my back on it for a moment. I turned back to see the tiny wood mouse had emerged from its nest box, and was gingerly approaching the wall of the base. I didn't believe it'd jump out, it was so nervous of me that it'd probably retreat back to its nest box. But it jumped over the wall of the base. I stood frozen in indecision as I watched it scurry off in no great hurry, find a corner of the kitchen where the central heating pipe returned into the wall, and disappeared into the wall. Exactly 21 (or maybe 20, or 22) years after receiving the gerbils, that is, on my birthday again, the little wood mouse escaped.