Eurasian harvest mouse
Micromys minutus
— Where the name comes from
Micromys is “small mouse”, minutus is “minute”: the binomial says the same thing twice, as if once were not enough to convey it. It weighs as much as a two-euro coin and is the lightest rodent in Europe. In English it is the harvest mouse, because in the fields it was discovered at reaping time.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Rodents
- Habitat
- Reedbeds, rice fields, tall grass, damp waste ground
- Range
- From western Europe to Japan
- Size
- 5–7 cm of body, tail as long again, 4–11 g
- Diet
- Seeds, ears of grain, insects, fruit
- Lifespan
- 18 months
— Characteristics
- 01
It is the only European rodent with a prehensile tail, which it uses as a fifth limb.
- 02
It lives suspended among stems, half a metre above the ground, hardly ever descending.
- 03
The nest is a sphere of leaves woven while still attached to the living plant.
— What sets it apart
It builds the only nest in Europe that is woven rather than heaped. The mouse takes a sedge leaf still attached to its stem, shreds it with its teeth into very fine strips while leaving it alive, and weaves the fibres into a ball the size of an orange, hung in mid-air among three or four stems. The plant goes on growing and the nest stays green and camouflaged as long as the young need it. It is architecture made from material never detached from the tree.
