Field mice: description, nutrition, reproduction, how do they winter?

How favorable the winter will be for the mouse depends on whether it was able to find suitable housing with a sufficient supply of food in the fall. The ideal option is a warm human home, a cellar, a barn or a room for keeping animals.

Under natural conditions, rodents have to independently take care of their own survival during the cold season.

Vole mouse: description of diet

The vole eats variedly, its diet depends on its location at a particular time.

• Roots;
• Roots and stems of plants;
• Lush grass;
• Berries;
• Insects.

• Cranberries, lingonberries, cloudberries;
• Bark of young bushes;
• Cones.

Offspring

The health of the offspring depends on the quality of the female’s nutrition during pregnancy and the interval between matings. At birth, babies do not see or hear anything, they have no fur, but they have a good appetite. Each weighs no more than 1.5 g.

After a week, you can see grown hair on the animals’ bodies, and the first incisors of the lower jaw appear in the mouth. By 14 days of age, a baby mouse can already see and hear.

Females have noticeable nipples from childhood. In males, the testicles move from the abdominal cavity to the scrotum only in the second week. It is after this that the gender of the offspring can be understood.

A wild litter is not the same as that of a domestic mouse. It develops faster. If indoor rodents are picked up prematurely, the mother may abandon them.

Therefore, offspring can be accustomed to human attention after three weeks, when rodents leave the nest in search of new horizons.

Month-old indoor animals can be given to other people for new families. At this age, they are unlikely to eat their mother's milk. And they switch to adult food and become completely independent.

Video

The mouse has given birth! What to do ?

Is the vole an omnivore?

The vole can be called an omnivorous rodent. This is due to the fact that in spring and summer the mouse eats only what it finds in its habitat (nuts, berries, plants and insects). After the onset of cold weather, the vole moves closer to humans. It can be:

• Warehouses;
• Attics of houses;
• Cellars.

In these places, individuals feed on winter supplies and cereals. In human dwellings, the vole does not have to choose its diet, so it eats everything it can get. These could be products such as:

What kind of homes do they have?

Yes, rats and mice do not sleep in winter. They move quickly around the premises. In principle, they prefer to be inside the building, but they often have to run outside to look for food.

They make their home close to food sources, so that no predators can reach them. They especially love the places between walls: they can move freely, mate, store supplies, raise offspring and disturb a person at night.

Benefits and harms

The vole is a very prolific animal. During the year, the female gives birth to offspring 3-4 times. Sexual maturity in field mice occurs as early as 2 months, and the average life expectancy is 2 years. If these rodents are not controlled, they can destroy huge amounts of crops and damage your home and garden.

What other harm do voles cause?

• The peculiarity of these mice is the growth of teeth throughout their lives. If you don't grind them down, your teeth grow to a decent size. Voles can chew even a wooden beam.
• If a field mouse settles in the garden, it can significantly damage shrubs and trees by gnawing the bark.
• The vole feeds on berries, so it can significantly reduce their yield.

The benefit of such mice is that it feeds on insects and their larvae, which can harm fruit and berry trees. Field mice are also participants in the food chain. These individuals are food for the following animals and birds :

How do mice reproduce: how are they born, how often do they reproduce, how many mice at one time?

Not only breeders, but also rodent fighters need to know how mice reproduce and how long they live. Cute domestic animals and terrifying street dwellers, under favorable conditions, are able to reproduce all year round.

Only at sub-zero temperatures does the female stop estrus and the males are not interested in her. An individual gives birth to about 10 cubs at a time, and the next litter may appear 1-2 months after the previous one.

During this period, the babies grow up and are able to become fertilized themselves.

Food at different times of the year

The field mouse eats a variety of foods, the choice of which depends on the season.

At this time, the harvest takes place; all the fruits in the gardens are ripe. The vole feeds on grain, seeds, and root crops.

Distribution of animals

This representative of the fauna is widespread in Europe. Animals can also be found in China, Mongolia, Denmark, Finland, Korea, and Taiwan. In the Russian Federation, the rodent is distributed in Primorye, Siberia, and the Urals. Often settles on the hills, climbs low into the mountains.

Found near the Black and Azov Seas. Does not like deserted forest-steppes and continuous forests. Settles well in moist interfluves

.

It prefers overgrown meadows with small depressions, collective farm fields, sunny edges of deciduous forests and, of course, vegetable gardens. It can be found in greenhouses, greenhouses, cellars, barns, abandoned utility sheds and even in residential premises.

IMPORTANT!

With the onset of autumn, rodents move into stacks, haystacks, and stacks of straw.

Do they stock up for the winter?

A field mouse builds from 1 to 3 burrows. The burrows are very simple and can be connected by corridors. Near them, the rodent builds storerooms, where it brings supplies for the winter. Usually, these supplies quickly run out, and then the mouse is forced to move closer to human habitation. Storerooms can be destroyed by predatory animals.

What foods does a vole store for the winter?

Vole in winter:

Voles are small but very voracious animals. They usually live in meadows and fields, moving closer to humans in autumn and winter. They gnaw tree bark, gnaw roots, eat seeds. They damage crops and carry dangerous diseases.

Prevention measures

Cats and dogs will help prevent field mouse attacks in the fall. Also, if owls have chosen your yard, you should not drive them away. If the garden is full of holes, you can loosen the soil more often and disturb their tunnels, then the mice will begin to look for other places to store food for the winter.

You should not litter the yard with rags, or the garden with branches and garbage, or heaps of leaves. Only by approaching the problem in a comprehensive manner can voles be repelled.

Field mice can cause significant damage to crops during the growing period; they are also dangerous when settling in warehouses and cellars in winter.

Good to know! Centuries-old practice has taught people to deal with annoying neighbors. Preventive measures and simple actions can easily get rid of rodents in the house. Sometimes, simply by spreading garlic and ash, you can scare away unwanted visitors.

Field mouse: description

A small rodent can be called differently: field mouse, meadow mouse, simply vole, small mouse, striped mouse. This animal is familiar to many people, since the lives of humans and rodents are often intertwined. With the onset of real winter cold, this pest moves closer to humans, appearing in barns, warehouses, sheds and other outbuildings, as well as in human homes. They often settle in dachas, gardens or personal plots.

It is not difficult to distinguish a field mouse from other rodents by a number of characteristic features. For example:

• It grows in length up to 12 cm, no more, while the average size of a rodent is about 10 cm. The tail of the animal is thin and makes up about 70% of the length of its body.
• The body shape is somewhat oblong with elongated hind feet. When the mouse moves, they protrude forward.
• The muzzle is elongated, with an oblong nose, and the ears are small but round.

Judging by its appearance, it is an attractive and harmless animal. Of particular interest is the mouse's red nose. The body structure of a mouse differs little from the body structure of many species of rodents.

The body is covered with short hair, which is characterized by uneven coloring, while the abdomen is always lighter compared to the rest of the body. The vole can be easily distinguished from other species of rodents by the characteristic black stripe located along the back. The color of the coat may vary depending on living conditions. In summer, the vole has a darker color, but with the arrival of winter, the color changes to lighter. In the images below you can see for yourself how the vole mouse differs from other rodents.

Interesting fact! Rodent teeth are unique in that they grow throughout life. This is especially true for a pair of long incisors, which appear already in the second month of life and grow by 1.5 mm daily. To prevent its teeth from growing excessively, the animal needs to constantly gnaw on something so that they wear down. At the same time, mice gnaw even those objects that have no nutritional value.

The average weight of a vole mouse is no more than 20 grams, although larger individuals are found, weighing up to 30 grams.

Signs of presence

It’s not at all difficult to guess that it was a water rat that visited the site. If they can be confused with moles based on the piles of discarded earth, then the remaining signs are very individual:

• trampled beds with stumps of gnawed plants. People call them “feed tables”;
• holes of different sizes and at different distances. Moles have approximately the same characteristics;
• eaten root vegetables. Water rats not only drag beets, potatoes, and carrots into holes, but also gnaw on the spot everything that they cannot carry away;
• nests at the roots of garden trees. They become especially noticeable in winter, when the labyrinths emerge from under the snow;
• there are many individuals of the species in the area. If there are pests in the fields, in other areas, near water bodies nearby, they are unlikely to miss a specific area.

Of course, the most striking indicator would be to spot a water rat in person at the crime scene. Many of them have the audacity to openly dominate foreign territories.

What does it eat?

What are the food preferences of a rodent, since it chews literally everything that comes its way? He is capable of even such addictions that are difficult to even imagine. They chew holes in wooden, concrete or brick structures. Their diet includes products made from foam, plastic or rubber, as well as products from other synthetic materials.

It is not difficult to assume that such interest is associated with the growth of the rodent’s front teeth. As food, mammals prefer grains, seeds and succulent parts of various plants, including young shoots, seedlings, vegetables and fruits. They often supplement their diet with worms, insects, eggs and chicks.

In a person’s home, the vole mouse spoils any food products, but does not disdain grain, bulk food products, vegetables, fruits, meat, lard, sausage, etc.

Interesting to know! The vole mouse stores for the winter if it is in the field, and during the winter it eats everything that it managed to collect during the warm period. As for other representatives of this family that were able to gain access to human reserves, they do not care about supplies for the winter. The rodent stores for itself for the winter food items that are edible. In this case, the amount of reserves depends on the size of the mink.

During the day, the mouse eats no more than 5 g of food and drinks up to 20 ml of liquid. Instead of water, rodents consume succulent parts of plants. Around mid-summer, the animal begins to make supplies for the winter.

Video

In the video you can see what field mice look like:

From what I know they make supplies for the winter:
• squirrels
• hamsters
• badger
• bee
• hedgehogs
• gophers
• Bears hibernate before they accumulate fat.
• raccoons
• caresses
• rodent haymaker
• the Siberian shrike bird uses the most terrible way to store its prey - it strings killed mice, insects, frogs on the thorns of bushes
• The following animals make provisions for the winter:
• these are mice

voles

• hamsters
• squirrel
• chipmunk, but their reserves do not always go entirely to them; it happens that the bear is not averse to eating their reserves, and may also swat the chipmunk.
• bees

nothing else comes to mind.

In winter, many animals also want to eat.

Because of the cold and snow, they cannot eat like they did in the warm season.

Therefore, animals make supplies for the winter.

Such animals include: squirrel, mink, weasel, mole, chipmunk, hamster, mice, bees and some other animals.

I’ll try to answer the question: Which animal stores for the winter?

1. Squirrel (hazelnuts, cones, mushrooms);
2. Mouse (grain);
3. Badger (plant roots, acorns, seeds);
4. Beaver (in winter it swims underwater and eats the roots of aquatic plants and branches stored in the fall);
5. Bee;
6. Chipmunk (pine nuts, acorns, etc.);
7. Mole (worms);
8. Hamster (grain, potatoes, carrots, corn and other products).

and others…

All kinds of rodents, mice, hamsters, badgers, raccoons, gophers, moles, beavers, chipmunks, voles, gerbils, and pikas make reserves for the winter. Squirrels also procure mushrooms and nuts, and bees procure honey. Weasels and stoats store supplies from mice, black polecats from frogs, muskrats and otters store fish under the ice.

It turns out that sometimes the most unexpected things can be learned about animals familiar from childhood.

rodents prepare supplies for the winter

: mice, hamsters, squirrels, chipmunks (which sleep in winter, like bears), minks, moles, beavers.

Insects

: bees always provide food for the family for the winter, storing honey in much larger quantities than they need for wintering. Therefore, a person also gets healthy honey.

Wasps

lay eggs in living caterpillars that are paralyzed by them.
And gall flies
feed future offspring with their own flesh.

The Bears

accumulate fat reserves, diligently eating before hibernation. And during the winter season they do not eat until spring.

Several animals stock up for the winter, such as squirrels, minks, moles, bears, chipmunks, and other rodents, insects and even birds. Each species has its own escape routes. For example, bears hibernate, birds go south, and the rest prepare supplies for winter, and wait it out underground.

Minks also collect food for the winter, but they are a predator and their winter supply is many times greater than that of squirrels, their supply is frogs, minks bite them in the part of the head where nerves accumulate, thereby the frogs become paralyzed, after which they are lowered not deep to the bottom of the river They also store carcasses of birds, rodents, and fish, often stealing them from fishermen.

Moles are animals that feed on insects, and although they are small in size, this does not interfere with their huge appetite. At a time they can eat as much food as their own weight. Therefore, they cannot do without large winter reserves; they prepare canned food from their favorite food such as earthworms. Moles, like minks, bite the brain nerve, immobilizing the worms and dragging them to their places where they can be stored all winter.

Chipmunks, preparing for the cold, make reserves of pine nuts and seeds; several buckets are enough for them throughout the winter. They can dig a hole for their food all day long, but these holes are often attacked by bears. In winter, chipmunks can wake up to have a snack and go back into sleep. So they have enough reserves for early spring, at a time when other animals have to look for it.

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The field mouse is a small rodent distributed throughout the world. Refers to the most numerous species of mammals - mouse classification. There are more than 100 species on earth. They adapt perfectly to any living conditions. There are no mice only high in the mountains, in areas covered with ice.

Lifestyle

In regions where a warm climate prevails, the meadow mouse leads an active lifestyle throughout the year. Therefore, they do not hibernate, but at the same time the process of reproduction of offspring slows down. Rodents tolerate low temperatures well and can safely overwinter directly in the field.

How successfully rodents can survive the winter depends on many factors. When it’s warm and comfortable outside, pests live in the field, but with the onset of various natural disasters, rodents can settle in the garden, vegetable garden, etc. For their homes, mammals dig holes to a depth of 1 meter, and with the onset of cold weather they go even deeper. As a rule, the meadow mouse spends the winter in its burrow.

Interesting to know! The rodent's system of underground passages includes a nest where future offspring appear and grow, as well as chambers where winter supplies are stored. At the same time, all labyrinths have access to water.

The vole mouse can spend the winter not only in burrows, but also in other conditions. To do this, they use haystacks, haystacks left on the field, straw stacks, barns, sheds and outbuildings. Some individuals manage to get into a person’s home. Therefore, the vole mouse can winter in any conditions.

In temperate latitudes, mice do not hibernate, so they need to store supplies for the winter, otherwise they may die. Although in winter, some individuals, especially if there is not enough food for them, come to the surface to find food for themselves. The result of their vital activity can be buried young cultivated plants.

It is important to know! There are species of voles that hibernate in winter and wake up only with the arrival of spring. At the same time, they accumulate a layer of fat for the winter.

Squirrel nests

The squirrel’s home, which zoologists call “gaino,” looks like a magpie’s nest. It is a kind of slightly elongated bag carefully made from twigs, grass and moss. The inside of the hole is also lined with moss, and sometimes there is a downy “decoration”.

Often, a squirrel’s home has a conical canopy outside that can reliably protect the “house” from strong gusts of wind and even rain.

Gayno squirrels usually form on fairly tall trees, at about half their height. According to zoologists, animals, as a rule, keep their homes clean. At the same time, quite often squirrels make their homes in tree hollows, and they also line the internal surfaces with “available materials” - grass, fluff and moss.

At the first sign of bad weather, squirrels try to quickly hide in their “nests.” Having plugged the entrance hole and comfortably covered with a fluffy tail, they curl up into balls, waiting out bad weather. They can do this for quite a long time, since they make supplies in advance, carefully collecting, for example, mushroom caps. The animals quickly string them onto bare branches to dry them for winter.

Features of behavior

Voles are quite active living creatures, as their metabolic process is quite fast. They need to eat quite often, as they use up their energy quite quickly. Mice have a hard time withstanding hunger, and even more so lack of water. Without food and water, a vole mouse can live no more than 1 week.

Despite such facts, the vole mouse adapts quite quickly to new conditions. Rodents move in certain ways, and they mark their territory with urine. They show their main activity when it gets dark. Under certain conditions, rodents become more active during the day.

Mice are quite cautious living creatures. They react to the slightest sound or rustle, quickly running away to their shelter. This indicates that rodents have many natural enemies and danger lurks at every turn.

The pest tries to constantly stay as close to its hole as possible, moving away from it only a few meters. As a rule, rodents move in tall grass, under bushes or in the shade. Each individual has its own territory marked. They prefer to live in flocks, controlled by dominant males and females.

Interesting to know! The lifespan of individuals in natural conditions is no more than 1 year, although scientists believe that mice can live up to 7 years. The thing is that mice have many natural enemies. In artificial conditions, the average age of rodents is about 3 years.

Reproduction

The breeding season for the vole mouse is from early spring to mid-autumn. In one season, the animal is capable of producing 3-4 offspring

. In rare cases, up to 5-6. Gestation of the cubs lasts 21-23 days. One litter usually produces 5-7 babies.

Babies are born helpless and blind, but they develop very quickly.

:

• 12-14 days after birth they begin to see clearly.
• 30 days after birth they become independent.
• Young individuals are capable of giving birth to cubs within 90-105 days after birth.

How long does a field mouse live? The lifespan of a field mouse can reach 7 years, but in the wild the animals usually live for a year or two.

Now imagine how quickly rodents can multiply in just one summer season, provided there is an abundance of food and sun.

Sabotage

Field mice, if not controlled, cause enormous damage to agriculture. At the same time, they not only eat the crop, but also dig holes, numerous ones, causing damage to the root system of various crops.

With the arrival of winter, if mice sneak into storage areas, which is not difficult, they can destroy up to a third of the supplies. At the same time, they contaminate food products with urine and feces, making them unfit for consumption.

It is important to know! The vole mouse does not bite and at the first danger it tries to quickly hide in its shelter. But if the animal is driven into a corner, it will definitely defend itself. At the same time, we must remember that rodents can infect humans with viruses, bacteria and infections, as well as serious illnesses.

Optimal wintering sites

The ideal winter home for any mouse would be a human home or outbuildings where there is access to food. Unfortunately, for this tribe, not all of their representatives are so successful in finding shelter for the cold season.

In nature, voles are attracted to winter crops, especially if the first shoots have appeared before the frost. In such conditions, even with minimal supplies, the animals do not remain hungry. Therefore, in the southern regions, in minks where mice live in winter, offspring often appear. In more northern regions, breeding is rare at this time of year.

Rodent control

If rodents are not constantly controlled, their numbers can lead to the loss of most of the crop. As a rule, rodent control is carried out in various ways, including traditional ones, without the use of chemicals that can harm the environment.

You will learn how mice prepare for winter in this article.

How do mice prepare for winter?

Vole bears living in the wild begin to prepare for the onset of cold weather from the end of summer. We all know that with the onset of winter, an unexpected guest in the guise of a mouse may appear at home. She probably became too lazy to prepare for winter, and she decided to make her task easier - to settle in a human dwelling. Well, it’s warm and there’s something to eat. But what if a mouse lives in a field?

First of all, the mouse begins to expand its hole - it expands the “bedroom”, as it will insulate it and dig out new storage rooms for winter supplies. They spend the entire winter period in a mink. They insulate their bedroom with dry grass, moss, hairs and fluff. The animal itself also changes - the fur changes color and becomes thicker. And the body accumulates nutrients and fats. It is worth noting that the body temperature of mice in winter can drop to the temperature of an icicle, but they do not die.

The mouse begins to carry food supplies for the winter into its pantries. It can be grains, seeds, dried fruits or grass. It happens that up to 5 kg of grain was found in mouse holes! These mice are such thrifty housewives.

We hope that from this article you learned how mice prepare for winter.

• Author: Maria Sukhorukikh
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How do they tolerate frost?

The mouse, like most rodents, cannot boast of large body sizes, so it is difficult for it to maintain a normal temperature.

To regulate this indicator, they try to generate more internal heat. The stronger the frost, the more heat the body produces.

If a rodent's vital activity decreases, this can lead to death . If the body is cooled for a long time, then nutrients begin to be rapidly consumed.

And those supplies that fill winter pantries are usually not able to make up for the resulting shortage.