The new edition of Joyce E. Hofmann’s Field Guide to Illinois Mammals is sturdy and beautifully packaged, savvy, and erudite. It’s easy to hold in your hand while out in some natural setting and hard to soil with its glossy and colorful pages. Indeed, it’s fun to carry anywhere with its cover images of two deer fawns and what seems to be a preternaturally intelligent red fox.
Updated and revised since its original publication in 2008, the Field Guide details just about anything anyone would want to know about Illinois’s 61 species of mammals. It’s the sort of handbook that’s essential reading for wildlife biologists, ecologists, naturalists and nature enthusiasts, such as hikers.
So, why do I find it so captivating?
I’m not an outdoorsman, nor a scientist of nature, nor a scholar of the landscape. I’m a city guy, born and bred in Chicago, and, by that, I mean the Chicago of alleys and gangways, of roof top tar and sidewalk crack weeds. Aside from rats and pigeons, I don’t expect to cross paths with creatures in the course of my day.
It was a red-letter moment a few years ago when I spotted a red fox loping, low to the ground, across the grass of Calvary Cemetery up in Evanston. I’m pretty sure I’d never seen a red fox before, and I certainly haven’t seen one since. It’s not like we’re neighbors or anything.
In reading Hofmann’s Field Guide, I found her red fox chapter surprisingly compelling. For example, her writing that the red fox “is the size of a small dog and has a pointed muzzle, large ears, and a long, bushy tail.” She goes on to note that its pelage, another word for fur, “is red or yellowish red with a sprinkling of black hairs on the back and tail” while the cheeks, insides of the ears, the “underparts” and the tip of the tail are white.
She writes that fox tracks are somewhat “dainty,” and fox scat, that is, its feces, “is deposited in the middle of trails, often on or near raised objects such as stumps or rocks, and has a musky smell.”
Fox scat, that is, its feces, “is deposited in the middle of trails, often on or near raised objects such as stumps or rocks, and has a musky smell.”
That’s a lot more up-close and personal than I ever expected to get to a red fox.
The Sad Irony of Armadillos
In her introduction, Hofmann, a retired field biologist, points out that, in addition to the 61 species of wild mammals in Illinois, there are feral animals that once were domesticated or are the progeny of former pets, such as house cats, dogs and, especially bothersome, hogs.
Since its settlement by European Americans, Illinois has lost its population of bison, elk, black bear, wolf, mountain lion and white-tailed jackrabbit. However, with human help, some species that had disappeared have been making a comeback, such as the white-tailed deer and beaver.
The Field Guide is not something I’d ever use very much in the course of my days, but it’s been enjoyable to page through it and discover lots of odd, unexpected stuff, such as the presence of the Mexican long-nosed armadillo among the state’s mammals.
Armadillos were first reported in the United States in southern Texas in 1849 and have expanded northward ever since. They were first spotted in Illinois in the 1970s, with reports greatly increasing since the turn of the century. Hofmann reports that large numbers of armadillos are killed on highways. Part of the reason for that is this sad irony:
If startled by a fast-moving vehicle they tend to jump just in time to be hit.
In the Field Guide, I learned that a gopher is a kind of rodent that has “external, fur-lined cheek pouches used for carrying food.” Who knew? (Well, probably all those naturalists and wildlife biologists.)
Illinois has only one species of gopher, the plains pocket gopher which has “a stocky body with short legs, small eyes and very short ears, a short sparsely haired tail; long, strongly curved front claws; and reduced hind limbs with short, blunt claws.”
The map with Hofmann’s chapter on this animal shows that it lives throughout central Illinois. And she provides some more information about those cheek pouches.
The gopher uses its external cheek pouches to carry vegetation to its storage chambers; roots and stems are cut into short pieces and pushed into the pouches with the forepaws. The paws are placed against the sides of the head and pressed forward simultaneously to remove the food.
That last sentence brings to my mind a kind of cartoon gopher, spitting out its food. Maybe that’s just me.
The House Mouse Diet
Food storage also comes up in Hofmann’s chapter on the house mouse. She notes that rural mice will eat “grass and forb seeds, corn, soybeans, roots, fruit, insects, insect larvae, fungus, and carrion.” It’s a different diet, however, for indoor mice:
Indoor mice help themselves to all types of human food (from meat to candy), pilfer pet food, catch cockroaches, and eat soap, paper, and the glue from book bindings. They cache food in their nests or hiding places, such as a bookcase or drawer.
The house mouse is a wild animal that I have had some interaction with over the years.
When startled, a jumping mouse can make leaps of 30-60 cm. (1-2 feet), or even 1 m. (3 feet).
There’s another mouse that caught my eye as I was going through the Field Guide, the meadow jumping mouse, which, according to Hofmann, lives basically everywhere in the state. This is one animal I’m sure I haven’t seen. Hofmann writes:
When startled, a jumping mouse can make leaps of 30–60 cm. (1–2 feet), or even 1 m. (3 feet). The mouse may then remain motionless, making itself hard for a pursuer to locate.
That’s interesting, but, because of the inexorable demands of survival of the fittest, there’s a melancholy aspect of the meadow jumping mouse’s story.
They’re the targets of natural predators such as raptors, foxes, mink, weasels, skunks, and snakes, but more deadly is the weather. Hofmann writes:
Winter mortality is very high for jumping mice; up to 75% do not survive hibernation. The mice that perish are mostly those born later in the year who did not accumulate sufficient fat reserves…Only a few jumping mice survive until their third year.
The city can be a hard place, but Nature is definitely a lot harder.
Field Guide to Illinois Mammals is available at bookstores and through the University of Illinois Press website.
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