20 THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
hold of a wriggling mouse, which has jumped to the ground and
thus escaped. On one occasion, my gardener, lying on the
bank of a ditch which divides the wood from an adjoining
meadow, whilst waiting for a chance to get a shot at a rabbit,
actually saw, in broad daylight, one of these mice climbing
up and down the bark of an ash-tree beneath which he was
lying.
Quite recently, I have observed another instance of this
mouse's remarkable climbing powers. Growing on the bank
of the ditch already mentioned is a large bush of Hawthorn
(Crataegus oxyacantha), sixteen or eighteen feet high, one of
several. Last autumn, it bore fruit ("haws") in greater num-
ber and of larger size than those on any of the other bushes.
Passing it about 22nd or 23rd October last, I noticed that its fruit
was then fully ripe and of unusual size and brilliance of colouring.
I noticed, too, that the bank and the bottom of the ditch just
below the tree were both strewn thickly with what appeared
to be fragments of the haws growing on the bush above. Getting
down into the ditch, I found that this is what they really were.
I came to the conclusion that they could only have been gathered
by mice, which must have climbed among the top-most twigs
of the bush, sixteen or eighteen feet up, had then chewed them
into fragments, and thrown them to the ground, where they
lay quite thickly, giving it a red tint as one viewed it at a dis-
tance of a few yards.
Examining next the individual berries, I perceived clearly
that they had been treated exactly as are the rose-hips left
by voles in old birds'-nests in hedges, as noticed above. It
was obvious, in this case also, that the mice were in search of
neither the soft pulp of the berry, nor its bright red outer skin,
both of which were torn off and thrown aside, though these are
eaten so freely by thrushes, blackbirds, and the like.
Often, the whole of the pulpy outer covering of the fruit was
not torn off, but only that portion covering the base of the berry
to a sufficient extent to enable the mouse to get at the "stone."
Obviously, what the mice had been after was the kernel inside
the stone of the fruit; and, to get at this, they had nibbled
away the base of the stone, until they had made a hole large
enough to extract the kernel, exactly as in the case of the much-
smaller seeds in the hips of the Wild Rose, as described above.