Mouse gets (Stuart) little fame

By NATE HUBBARD/Staff

An Ivanhoe cat had quite the present for its owners last week: Stuart Little.
Regina Sayers and her son, Philip, 17, returned home around 10 p.m. on July 9 to find the family’s gray tabby, Gunther, outside preparing for his familiar role of mouse executioner.
Gunther, though, wasn’t toying with any old brown or gray field mouse.
Much to Regina’s surprise, her cat’s prey had a whitish-blond coat and tell-tale pink eyes –the marks of an albino.
“We were just amazed,” Regina said.
Before Gunther could complete his deadly deed, Regina shooed him out of the way and called Philip for help in corralling the Hollywood mouse look-a-like.
Using his cell phone as an impromptu flashlight, Philip provided enough illumination for his mom to spot the mouse again.
“I put the toe of my shoe on its tail and wouldn’t let it go,” Regina recalled. “The cat was about to get my leg, too.”
Philip then grabbed the mouse’s tail with his fingers and the pair had the unusual critter subdued.
“I think it squirmed a little, but after that it pretty much just laid there,” Philip said.
With time to take a closer look at their discovery, Regina said that her initial hunch proved to be correct – the mouse looked more like a lab specimen, but in actuality was a wild albino field mouse.
Regina snapped a few photos of her unusual find and found a contact with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries through a “Virginia Wildlife” magazine for a professional opinion on her discovery.
The trained eye confirmed her excitement.
“It does indeed look like your cat found a young albino deer mouse (Peromyscus),” stated Lou Verner, a wildlife diversity biologist, in an e-mail response to Regina after looking at an attached digital photo.
“It’s the first one I’ve ever seen, and as I mentioned, it’s not very likely that such an animal would ever be seen in the wild,” Verner continued. “In addition to being rare to begin with, mice in general don’t live very long and an albino’s chances of surviving would be that much less. Quite the find!”
Regina’s husband, Garland, gave the rescued mouse its Stuart Little moniker and on Thursday the Sayers had the star attraction in Ivanhoe.
Regina said she invited all her neighbors to come see her furry find and widely e-mailed the digital photos to other family and friends.
The mouse had suffered some injuries from its encounter with Gunther and was bleeding slightly when the Sayers captured it, but Regina initially thought he was going to pull through.
After Stuart slipped out of a cottage cheese container with air holes when Regina lifted the lid (“He was crawling around on top of my stove!” she said), a neighbor provided a more suitable home in the form of an old plastic hermit crab enclosure.
Stuart appeared to be settling into his new digs and even ate a meal or two, but by late Thursday afternoon all the excitement and the wounds suffered at the paws of Gunther proved to be too much.
“We killed Stuart Little I guess,” Regina said. “Blame it on the cat.”
Although Regina said she wasn’t quite sure what she planned to do with the extraordinary mouse long term, she said she was sad to see him pass away.
“I just thought it was cute,” she said. “I hated that the poor little fellow died.”
When Regina and Philip initially grabbed the albino mouse away from Gunther last week, Regina said Stuart had his front paws clasped in a way that made him appear to be “praying ‘Please don’t give me back to the cat.’”
So despite Stuart’s untimely death, Regina said she’s glad he had a more peaceful end.
“I gave it another chance at life,” she said. “He had a lot of attention.”
Nate Hubbard can be reached at 228-6611 or