Wood mouse
Apodemus sylvaticus
— Where the name comes from
Apodemus reads as the Greek apódēmos, “away from the people, out of one’s own country”: it is the mouse that lives away from houses, as against the house mouse. Sylvaticus, “of the woods”, says it again. In English it is the wood mouse, and in many European languages its name always holds the same opposition — there is the mouse that lives with us and the one that lives outside.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Rodents
- Habitat
- Woodland, hedgerows, fields, dunes, gardens; anywhere with cover
- Range
- Europe, north-western Africa, western Asia
- Size
- 8–10 cm of body plus a nearly equal tail, 13–27 g
- Diet
- Omnivore — seeds, acorns, shoots, insects, snails
- Lifespan
- Under a year in the wild
— Characteristics
- 01
The eyes and ears are disproportionately large compared with the house mouse.
- 02
Like a lizard it can shed the skin of its tail if seized, and escape.
- 03
It is the most abundant mammal in much of Europe’s woodland.
— What sets it apart
It builds signposts. Several studies have documented that it moves conspicuous objects — leaves, twigs, snail shells, scraps of plastic — and sets them out as landmarks along the routes it uses, shifting them if the ground changes. It is one of the very few cases in which an animal alters its surroundings neither for shelter nor for food but to find its way: a use of objects as external memory, in a rodent of twenty grams that lives less than a year.
