It was made in the fork of a hazel-branch, and was about four feet from the ground, so that the small branches served to strengthen as well as conceal it. The nest was exactly six inches long by three in width, and was made almost entirely of several kinds of grass, the broad-bladed sword-grass being the chief material. Interwoven with the grass-blades were sundry leaves, all hazel and maple, and none of them having been taken from the branch on which the nest was built. It is therefore possible that a dormouse may have placed the nest in Mr. Waterton’s mill-stone. I do not, however, think it probable, because there was no bush near the stone, and, as far as is known, the dormouse always stores its food close to its nest. The squirrel, however, ranges farther afield, and may often be seen in the winter-time digging through the snow, at some distance from its tree, so as to disinter the hidden food.
Another vegetable-eating hibernating rodent is the too well-known hamster (_Cricetus frumentarius_) of Northern Europe.
It is about a foot in length, but, on account of its numbers, is a most formidable enemy to the agriculturist. Even when seeking its daily food it is terribly destructive to the crops, but its worst raids are made at the end of the autumn, when it provides a store for the winter. For this purpose it excavates a deep and complicated system of burrows, in which it stores a quantity of grain so enormous that after the harvest the farmers are in the habit of digging up the hamster’s burrows and securing their stolen property.
A single hamster carried off sixty pounds of wheat for its winter store, while another had thought that a hundred weight of beans were necessary for its subsistence. The animal wakes very early from its hibernation, sometimes even in February. It does not, however, come out of its burrow at once, but remains beneath the earth until the warm weather has fairly set in.
I need not say that intertropical bears do not require to hibernate. Moreover of those bears which inhabit the colder climates the adult males seldom, if ever, hibernate, while the young of both sexes are very uncertain in this respect. For example, with the grizzly bear the young males and females are found at large throughout the whole of winter, and the same is the case with the polar bear. With the brown bear of Northern Europe and the black bear of North America the young animals seem to be rather capricious in hibernating.