The Second Book of General Ignorance (6 page)
Read The Second Book of General Ignorance Online
Authors: John Lloyd,John Mitchinson
Two points each for Harvest mouse, House mouse, Field mouse and Wood mouse – and four points for Yellow-necked mouse – but minus ten for dormouse.
The dormouse is more of a squirrel than a mouse.
Admittedly, it does look rather mouse-like – except for its tail, which is furry. (Mice have scaly tales.) It also has fur inside its ears – which mice don’t. In fact, the dormouse is generally furrier all round. This to keep it warm in winter: it’s the only British rodent that hibernates.
The ‘dorm-’ part of its name means ‘sleepy’ and sleeping is what it’s best at. The golden-coloured Common (or Hazel) dormouse can spend three-quarters of its life asleep. It’s also known as the ‘seven-sleeper’ because it regularly spends seven months of the year dormant, though warmer winters now mean its hibernation lasts five and a half weeks less than it did twenty years ago.
If you want to get involved with dormice, you’ll need to go on a Dormouse Handling Course and apply for a government dormouse licence. The British dormouse population has fallen by 70 per cent in the last quarter century and it is now strictly illegal to disturb, let alone kill, this rarely seen nocturnal creature.
The much larger Edible (or Fat) dormouse (
Glis glis
) is even less common in Britain than the Common dormouse (
Muscardinus avellanarius
). It’s grey and white and could easily be mistaken for a small squirrel with big ears. It was introduced to Britain in 1902 by Lord Rothschild, as part of his wildlife collection in Tring Park, Hertfordshire – since when escapees have spread across the Chilterns. They can be a serious pest in lofts and outbuildings and can cause fatal damage to young trees. It’s legal to shoot them.
The Romans were very keen on eating Edible dormice,
though there’s no evidence that they brought them to Britain. They kept them in earthenware pots called
dolia
, fattening them up on a diet of walnuts and currants, and storing the pots in special dormouse gardens or
glisaria
. Recipes included roast stuffed dormouse and honey-glazed dormouse with poppy seeds.
It’s a taste that survives in many parts of Europe, where dormouse hunting is illegal but often done. In Calabria in southern Italy, where tens of thousands are eaten annually, the Mafia allegedly controls the lucrative dormouse trade.
In 2007 fifteen Calabrian restaurateurs were charged with serving
Glis
stewed in wine and red pepper. They all denied the allegations. Their defence was that the meat in the casseroles wasn’t dormouse – it was only rat.
It’s much further than you think.
The idea that you are ‘never more than 6 feet away from a rat’ is wrong by a factor of ten. Of course, it depends where you live: some of us live close to hundred of rats, others live near none. But rats, although they happily live off our rubbish, don’t like to get too close. Rentokil, the pest control company, estimates that the average city dweller is at least 21 metres (70 feet) from the nearest one.
The bad news is that rats in the UK now outnumber people. According to the National Rodent Survey, there are around 70 million rats in the country:10 per cent more than the current human population.
Rats carry seventy or so infectious diseases including salmonella, tuberculosis and Weil’s disease. They are also responsible for consuming a fifth of the world’s food supply each year. Their sharp teeth (which never stop growing) enable them to gnaw through almost anything, causing a quarter of all electric cable breaks and disconnected phone lines in the process.
Plus, they brought the fleas that gave us bubonic plague. And they have those nasty, scaly tails.
It was the Black or Ship rat (
Rattus rattus)
that brought the plague. It sought out human company because our living conditions were so squalid. Slovenly disposal of food waste causes 35 per cent of rat infestations: broken sewers only 2 per cent.
Today,
Rattus rattus
is one of the UK’s rarest mammals. Only small clusters remain, around big ports like London and Liverpool and on remote islands like Lundy, where they still are regularly (and legally) culled. The Black rat doesn’t appear on any endangered lists – presumably because it’s a rat.
Any rat you see today is almost certain to be the larger, stronger Brown or Norway rat (
Rattus norvegicus
), which arrived in the UK less than 300 years ago. They have nothing to do with Norway (they originated in northern China) and they don’t carry plague. In fact, their use in laboratory experiments saves many human lives.
The dreaded rat’s tail is actually a device for regulating body temperature. It acts as a long, thin radiator (rather like an elephant’s ears), which is why it isn’t covered in hair.
ALAN
You know, all the rats in England all face the same direction
at any given time …BILL BAILEY
’Cause they’re magnetic, aren’t they, rats?ROB BRYDON
It’s very hard for rat couples who have that, kind of,
reversed polarity going on. You know, when you can’t put two
magnets together? There are rats who fall in love, and they are
destined to be together, and they can’t kiss.
The Wind in
the Willows
?
You won’t be surprised to hear that he’s not a rat.
The Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932) began as a series of letters to his young son, Alistair (nicknamed ‘Mouse’). After being rejected by several publishers, it came out in book form in 1908 – the same year that Grahame retired after thirty years working at the Bank of England.
Ratty, one of the main characters, is a water vole (
Arvicola
amphibius
), colloquially known as a ‘water rat’. As a child, Kenneth Grahame would have seen plenty of water voles, nesting in the riverbanks near his grandmother’s home at Cookham Dean on the Thames – but today they are one of Britain’s most endangered species. Water voles underwent a catastrophe after the fur trade started farming imported American mink in the 1920s. Unlike native predators, mink can follow voles right into their tunnels. Escaped mink (and their descendants) have been eating vast numbers of voles ever since, wiping them out entirely in many places.
This is bad news for future archaeologists. Voles are the world’s fastest-evolving mammals, dividing into new species up to a hundred times faster than the average vertebrate. This allows archaeologists to use the so-called ‘vole clock’. Carbon
dating only works up to about 50,000 years ago. For older digs, the investigators use fossilised vole teeth – tiny things about the size of a fingernail clipping. The ways they have altered at different stages in voles’ evolution are so specific that items found alongside them can be dated with great accuracy.
Water voles are vegetarian but, in 2010, researchers in Berkshire were amazed to discover they had been eating the legs of toads. It’s thought that pregnant voles needing extra protein were responsible, but it seems like poetic justice given all the trouble that Toad caused Ratty in the book.
Early reviews of
The Wind in the Willows
were damning. Arthur Ransome (1884–1967), author of
Swallows and Amazons
, wrote that it was ‘like a speech to Hottentots made in Chinese’. It only started to sell after Grahame sent a copy to US President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), who adored it.
Grahame’s own life was much less delightful than the riverside idyll he wrote about. His mother died when he was five, causing his father to drink himself to death. As Secretary to the Bank of England, he spent his time collecting fluffy toys and writing hundreds of letters in baby language to his equally strange fiancée, Elspeth. In 1903 he survived an assassination attempt when a ‘Socialist Lunatic’ shot him at work (the Governor wasn’t available). Luckily, the fire brigade managed to subdue the terrorist by turning a hose on him.
The life of his troubled son, Alistair (‘Mouse’), was even worse. Blind in one eye from birth, his childhood hobbies included lying down in front of passing cars to make them stop. He had a nervous breakdown at school and then took to calling himself ‘Robinson’ – the name of his father’s would-be assassin. In 1920, while an undergraduate at Oxford, Alistair lay face down across a railway track in Port Meadow and was decapitated by a train.
It wasn’t a rabbit – or a hedgehog, or a frog – or anything remotely cute. The first living things that Beatrix Potter wrote about were fungi.
Fungus
is Latin for mushroom. You might think it’s pushing it a bit to call a mushroom an animal, but fungi are biologically closer to animals than they are to plants. Since 1969 they’ve had their own kingdom (along with yeasts and moulds) and they’re neither plant nor animal.
The English author and illustrator Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) was educated by governesses and grew up isolated from other children. From the age of fifteen she recorded her life in journals, using a secret code that wasn’t unravelled until twenty years after her death. She had lots of pets: a bat, newts, ferrets, frogs and two rabbits (Benjamin and Peter), whom she took out for walks on leads. She spent her summers in Scotland and the Lake District where her close observation of nature led her to become an expert on fungi or ‘mycologist’.
Although an amateur, Potter kept up with all the latest advances in mycology.
Her first published work, presented at the Linnaean Society in 1897, was
On the Germination of Spores of Agaricineae
. It had to be read out for her by her uncle, because women were not allowed to address meetings. She applied to study at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, but was turned down for the same reason – and the Royal Society refused to publish at least one
of her papers. A hundred years later, the Linnaean Society, at least, had the grace to issue a belated posthumous apology.
Potter was an early pioneer of the theory that lichens were a partnership between fungi and algae – two separate organisms rather than one – and she produced a series of detailed drawings to support her hypothesis. This idea, later confirmed as correct, was considered heretical by the British scientific establishment at the time, but her scientific illustrations were greatly admired. This proved useful when she came to write her children’s books.
The first of Beatrix Potter’s twenty stories for children began life in 1893, as a letter to a young boy named Noel Moore, whose mother had been one of her governesses. The ex-governess loved the story and persuaded her to publish it. Frederick Warne brought it out in 1902, and by Christmas
The
Tale of Peter Rabbit
had sold 28,000 copies. Within a year, Peter Rabbit was so popular he had become a soft toy, making him the world’s first licensed character.
Peter Rabbit was inspired by a pet rabbit named Peter Piper, bought for the young Beatrix in Shepherd’s Bush for 4s 6d. He was trained to ‘jump through a hoop, and ring a bell, and play the tambourine’. Although he brought her fame and financial security, Potter was baffled by the success of her creation: ‘The public must be fond of rabbits! What an appalling quantity of Peter.’
Beatrix Potter borrowed the names for many of her characters from tombstones in Brompton Cemetery in London, which was near the family home in South Kensington. Peter Rabbett, Jeremiah Fisher, Mr Nutkins, Mr Brock and Mr McGregor are all buried there.