Talk:Wood mouse

the new first bit by User:82.46.109.210
This information, while perhaps interesting, should be incorporated into the article, and not just added. There's no wikification, and it duplicates other info. Perhaps move to the end. Flyguy649 17:42, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

ten strals per hour?
After considerable searching I can't figure out what a stral is ... if this could be converted to a standard unit of measurement I am sure we could better appreciate the wood mouse's notable speed. 76.24.20.92 15:19, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Seconded. In fact, most of the references I can find to 'stral' discuss mice. Dubious.81.105.70.251 (talk) 17:52, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Having had another bout of Googling (ouch), I absolutely cannot source this 'stral'. The phrase 'almost ten strals per hour' only crops up when discussing this mouse ( http://www.google.com/search?q=%22almost+ten+strals+per+hour%22 ), and the phrase 'strals per hour' only additionally appears in an in-universe RPG page, and a student's report ( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22strals+per+hour%22 ). Somebody's plagiarising somebody (or independently creating a new unit of distance), which leads me to suspect that the section 'Field Mouse' is dodgy. I've unreferenced-tagged it for now, hopefully someone wiser in the way of the Mouse than me can clean it up.81.105.70.251 (talk) 02:43, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Unreliable source?
Most of the large chunk of text in the article is oddly similar to http://santharia.com/bestiary/field_mouse.htm, the parent site of which goes on to discuss Gryphons - http://santharia.com/bestiary/gryph.htm. Is the above-mentioned stral a fictional unit used in an RPG? Also, 'They will sleep in clumps of grass and leaves like in this picture'... which picture? Not the one present in the article.81.105.70.251 (talk) 18:00, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Removed Shetland-specific history section
I have removed the following text, comprising the entirety of the "History" section, from the article, and have added it to Shetland instead:

The geographical isolation and recent glacial history of Shetland have resulted in a depleted mammalian fauna. The wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus L.), along with the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus Berkenhout) and the house mouse (Mus musculus domesticus Schwartz & Schwartz), are one of only three recorded types of rodent present on the island. Based largely on morphological studies of epigenetic variations, the source of the original founding population has been attributed to Norway with the most obvious date of introduction being presumed to be around the 9th century AD with the arrival of the Vikings. However, archaeological evidence now suggests that this species was present during the Middle Iron Age (around 200 BC - AD 400), and one theory proposes that Apodemus was in fact introduced from Orkney where a population had existed since at the least the Bronze Age.

I'm noting this here in case someone else wants to incorporate material from it back into the article after all, as there's no guarantee it'll survive at that level of detail in the Shetland article. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:08, 1 May 2008 (UTC)


 * By the way, the style of writing strongly suggests to me that this paragraph may have been copied from an academic source, the obvious suspect being the cited Nicholas, Barber & Bond 2005 article. Unfortunately, full text archives of Environmental Archaeology don't seem to be available online even through my university subscription, so I can't confirm this suspicion.  —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:19, 1 May 2008 (UTC)