After years of watching for wildlife tracks, the mice have become my favorites - those exquisitely tiny prints, like small human hands. Miniaturization has such strong appeal. A perfect quarter-inch deer mouse track is something you’ll never forget! You’ve really tumbled into another world now, everything so much bigger, frightening and exhilarating at the same time.
Walking through the deserts and grasslands of southern New Mexico, I am likely surrounded by wild mice - deer mice, pocket mice, and grasshopper mice, among others. But since these animals are small, light on the ground, and foraging under grass and brush, I don’t often find their tracks. When I do, there’s some skill involved.
Studying the ground, usually on the ground, I contemplate the classic rodent hind foot, with Toes 1 and 5 out to the side and Toes 2, 3, 4 close together and pointed forward. The middle toes are not bulbous and connected to the palm pad and have a longer Toe 3. So maybe this is a pocket mouse. Or the toes are bulbous and not connected to the palm pad. Perhaps a deer mouse. Or the toes are slightly bulbous with Toe 1 set significantly back. Possibly a harvest mouse.
Like humans, rodents walk on all the bones of their feet, and I think I can see three palm pads and two heel pads in the front feet and four palm pads and two heel pads in the hind feet. Possibly I am imagining this. Definitely, I need to get out my reading glasses.
Some mouse tracks are more exciting than others. These would be “jackpot” mice!
For example, the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse requires wetland and riparian areas and is on the federal list of endangered species. This extraordinary rodent can jump up to three feet, swims readily, and hibernates for as much as nine months of the year. Its hind feet are unusually long.
Perhaps our state’s most impressive mouse, however, is relatively common - if also nocturnal and secretive. The southern grasshopper mouse, weighing about an ounce, is highly predacious and regularly eats insects such as darkling beetles and grasshoppers. Famously, these animals have evolved to become immune to the poison of the bark scorpion, which they kill by leaping high and biting off the stinging tail. They have also been filmed in gladiatorial combat with the equally large and fast desert centipede. Sometimes the grasshopper mouse kills other mice, small birds, or its own sexual partner. At certain moments, perhaps to mark territory or scare off another predator, the mouse lifts up its head in the iconic pose of a wolf howling at the moon. And then it does howl - a shrill whistle sounding through the night.
Partly excerpted from Sharman Apt Russell’s What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Trough Their Tracks and Signs (Columbia University Press, 2024). For more information, go to www.sharmanaptrussell.com.
