White-footed mice feed mainly on many kinds of seeds and nuts and vary this diet with snails, insects, and sometimes with the flesh of dead birds or other mice. As they do not hibernate they lay up abundant stores of grain and seeds of many kinds in addition to a variety of nuts, as acorns, beech nuts, pine nuts, maple seeds, and others, according to the locality. The stores are hidden in hollows in logs, stumps, trees, or in the ground. When in captivity they have shown themselves expert in catching flies, sometimes capturing them with their teeth and again with their front paws used with all the dexterity of little hands. Several litters of young containing from three to seven each are born, the first usually appearing in spring and the last in fall. The young are blind and helpless at birth, and in this condition cling so tenaciously to the mother’s teats that when she is frightened from the nest they are often carried off attached to her. Some individuals at least of the white-footed mice, like others of the genus Peromyscus, are known to have a prolonged and musical song. It is a fine warbling ditty, a little like the song of a canary. A number of good observers have recorded these performances, but they appear to be so infrequent that most people with woodland experience have never heard them. The lives of these mice are passed in constant fear of a host of enemies. Hawks and owls, bluejays, and shrikes in the bird world are ever on the alert to capture them, while skunks, weasels, minks, foxes, and snakes persistently seek them in their retreats. =THE BEACH MOUSE= (=Peromyscus polionotus niveiventris= and its relatives) (_For illustration, see page 530_) The beach mouse is a beautiful, velvety-furred little creature about the size of a house mouse and one of the smallest species of the genus Peromyscus. Its back is colored with delicate shades of pale vinaceous-buffy and its underparts, including the feet, are snowy white. The species _Peromyscus polionotus_, of which the beach mouse is one of several geographic races, or subspecies, occupies a comparatively restricted range in the lowland region of Alabama and Georgia and thence through a large part of Florida. It presents an unusually convincing illustration of the influence of changing environment upon the physical characters of animals. Among the cotton fields of Alabama and Georgia _Peromyscus polionotus_ is rather dark grayish brown, but on the lighter-colored soil of Florida the color responds and becomes paler in perfect correspondence with the change in soil until the white sand-dunes and beaches of the coast are reached. There, in strong contrast with the color of the northern members of the species, it is so modified that the pale representatives of this area are recognized under the name _niveiventris_, as a geographic race, or subspecies.