Rats have the reputation of being cute and cunning. Not so mice. After all, you might think, they get the chop so easily by eating the bits of cheese you put in those primitive traps. Now rats: one brown villain is so agile that he can climb a tree, shinny head-first down a four-foot perpendicular wire from which a bird feeder is suspended and, when he has had his fill, or as much as he can be bothered to strive for, runs effortlessly up again. But a new respect for mice emerges as you read through a cutting sent by a friend. It is from an old National Geographic Magazine and concerns the habits of mice in woods on Long Island. In summer the mice, called white-footed, subsist mostly on insects, but as autumn comes on, they begin to store small caches of one to three acorns, called scatter hoards, against the coming cold weather.
An odd thing now. The article runs: "Never satisfied, they move the hoards around each night. The mice rely on smell to locate the acorns underground - seemingly unaware of where they last dug and thus constantly steal from one another. When Bob Unnasch (presumably one of the team) buried a thousand marked acorns, mice had moved every one by the next morning." If it wasn't written in a prestigious journal like the National Geographic, you would find that hard to believe. Is it that they are constantly shifting their larder for stability? Neither the mice nor the acorns looked very big, according to a photograph. Some acorns from big trees are small: it's the kind of oak they are. The article further tells us that more than eighty North American birds and mammals include fresh acorns in their diet. (Some humans used to, also, in hard times, ground and mixed with flour.)
The article goes on to tell us what we all know: many of our oak trees are probably the result of a small cache of acorns buried by, perhaps a squirrel or a jay, and forgotten. Not so often do acorns which fall and begin to sprout under the carpet of autumn leaves, survive. On one unusual year, acorns fallen into a lawn which was more moss than grass, and seldom cut, suddenly in a wet early warmth, shoved their way through and presented the owners with about a hundred useful seedlings. Some are now trees thirty feet high. Y