Читать книгу New Ideas for American Boys; The Jack of All Trades - Daniel Carter Beard - Страница 29

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These animals can be readily distinguished by their long, chisel-like front teeth. A familiar example of this family may be found in every town and city, and is known as the common rat, the Norway rat, or the brown rat.

Formerly the common rat of the United States was black, but his brown relative has about exterminated the more graceful black one. The only black rat I ever saw was a dead one, which I found one summer in an unoccupied house in the mountains of Pennsylvania. But there are plenty of beautiful little gnawers around us everywhere. There are the soft, furry, big-eyed flying-squirrels, which leave their warm nests at dusk and sail through the air from tree to tree, or romp among the branches until daylight. Just at dawn they return to their beds, to sleep away the day in their dark holes, secure from the garish sunlight.

Of course any boy with money can purchase flying-squirrels, but no boy with any pride would stoop to buy his live game, unless he is so unfortunate as to be unable to leave the densely populated city. I well remember the two boys[4] who gave me my first lessons in hunting flying-squirrels. I followed them across meadows, over hills, through the woods, down into the dank and dark swamps, until we found some old hollow cedars on the edge of the water. Here one of the lads armed himself with a small wand, and the other busied himself gathering old dry leaves and bits of moist bark to make a smudge. The boy armed with the wand probed the hollow trees until he discovered a hole from which the wand would bring forth some bits of the fine shredded inner bark of the cedar. We all know that neither the inner bark nor any other kind of bark grows in the hollow of trees, and when it is discovered there you can wager that it was put there by some animal.

Figs. 9-11.

This stringy, soft stuff is famous material for a nest, and both the white-footed mice and the flying-squirrels are fully aware of its good properties.

When some of this nesting is found in a tree, it is safe to say that there is a nest inside.