Let's Get To Know Mouse/Rat

Good Morning and Happy New Year, especially to Idebee who enjoys sunny mice! Note that the greeting is also written in Gaelic Manx, the language which some folks on the Isle of Man are still able to speak.

France,2013
"When the cat's away
the mice are at play"

Hi, Kris, Happy New Year! Thanks you very much! This is really a surprise to see the sun and mouse together again. Sunny mice is a wonderful name! I have another stamp a little related to this and I will talk about it later.

And as for the sun & moon stamp in the previous page, I suddenly come to remember that the design is actually alike a Chinese hyerogliphic character, Ming, which has the sun at the left and the moon at the right, and meaning bright, clear, or sunny.

The famous Chinese NBA basketball player Yao Ming, who is often called Ming by his teammates, just uses this character as his given name.

Why I can only find this, it's not a rat but a butterfly in the mouth of the eagle owl! :-) I used to doubt that it's a design error, since the eagle owl is so big, and it looks like they won't eat a butterfly. Most of the infos found on the web say that they diet on little mammals. But after many searches I finally found a professional scientific research report, showing that they eat some insects sometimes from the study of their excrements. Anyway, it's indeed dangerous for the rats because owls mainly diet on them, the so called natural enemies! But from another perspective, we are educated that the owls are beneficial birds for their big appetite to eat grain consuming rats! :-)China used to issue a set of five beneficial birds stamps and a sheet, and below is FDC with an owl.

CCCP has a similar topic titled the Forest Defender in 1984.


Four typical owls of China. Actually all owls in China are enlisted as protected animals for their rat eating habits.

It's interesting that there is a corresponding Chinese idiom. But if translated word for word, it is like: When there is no tiger in the mountain, the monkey calls itself the king. :-) Or when the tiger is away, the monkeys will play!

And yet another barn owl and a mouse! This is a most interesting motif because it looks as if the mouse is sitting in a kind of spider's web. Since it is New Year's Day, maybe they are just talking to each other. In the stamp itself is the eagle owl, and it seems to be full moon. 2018

Glad you liked the sunny mouse, Idebee. By the way, one can see quite well what an owl has eaten if one finds a pellet-like hairball which the birds throw up from their stomachs, it contains hair, bones, and the hard parts of insects, etc. The hairballs are fun to analyse. K.

Hi, Kris, pellet is the word that I forgot. The research report just used them to analysis the foods of the owls. But I did not know that they throw the pellets up through their mouth. thanks a lot for mentioning it, it's very interesting habit to know. And your seriers owl & rat stamps remind me that actually rat predators is a good sub category of this topic, which will provide a different angel to look at rats!

The legend of the Rat Pass (written in catalan language on this stamp from Andorra)
A big,ugly,violent - and probably stupid - man wants to marry a girl,and to seduce her he changes himself into a rat.
And the girl's cat eats him.

This may have been what it looked like when the cat caught sight of the rat at the pass? North Korea, 2010

Have you ever been over that pass? It must be quite daunting.

Two mice on stamp cancels,from Slovakia and Czech Republic

Yellow weasels used to be notorious and hated for their abilities to steal chickens in China. There is even a idiom saying: When he makes a courtesy call to a hen, the yellow weasel harbors no good intentions. But they are now enlisted as protected beneficial animals .

(In Chinese, Yellow Weasel is called Yellow Rat Wolf for direct translation. :-& )

Happen to see Kris' cat together with this cat with the same face, but he is meowing at illegal software! :-) What a coincidence!

One of the most skilled hunters of mice is the ermine (Mustela erminea), same genus as the Siberian one. It can catch mice or rats almost its own weight! In the winter it is pure white except for the tip of its tail and was hunted almost to extinction for that pure white pelt which was used to decorate the coats of nobility. stamp of 1993

Sable. Always confused with weasel, as well as marten! :-(


I don't know if it is a sable chasing a big rat, or a rat being chased by a small sable? :-) Anyway the rat looks even bigger than the sable, but later caught and killed by it!