A mouse among the pigeons

My son and I arrived in Basel very early by night train. There we see a square partially covered by a makeshift balcony on a wooden platform, a decimeter above the road surface. The tent was still closed, but where there were people, there was trash, even in clean Switzerland. There are food scraps and sunflower seeds on the stones, which dozens of city pigeons feed on. And the mouse: the brown mouse.

brown mice (Norwegian rat) It can reach thirty centimeters in length, not counting its tail, but it usually does not reach twenty centimetres. When people see rats, they often think they are rats because they think rats are two-foot-tall, aggressive monsters. But mice are smaller and certainly as afraid of humans as humans.

Not all people are afraid of mice. Around 1980, a mouse as a pet was popular among villains. None other than Martin Hart gives advice on keeping mice in his book King of mice. House mice are brown, but white, and sometimes gray or black. Punks sculpted their hairstyles with butter or soap in the shape of so-called rat heads. There were comic books about the bandit Red Rat. The LP came out and I played it gray like a mouse (brown): Norwegian rat, from the stranglers. The Outsiders became famous for their good songs, but at that time they were still as rough and messy as mice.

“The brown rat is very difficult to catch because it is highly suspected of foreign objects,” according to the Mammal Society website. Well, that’s true. The mouse among the pigeons only appears for a moment. Run below deck with the loot. And here he is in funny squirrel mode, enjoying his meal. Then he lurks from his hiding place for a long time, before suddenly running over the stones, snatching a sunflower seed from among the pigeons, and retreating with lightning speed. My son and I watch motionless.

Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes about something growing or flowering.