Atlas der Säugetiere Nordrhein-Westfalens

Gelbhalsmaus

870 entries

Yellow-necked mouse

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Apodemus flavicollis

The Yellow-necked Mouse belongs to the true mice. Due to their appearance with large dark button eyes, long rounded ears (Mickey Mouse ears) and a long tail, the species is eminently popular. The upper side is a warm brown tone clearly contrasting with the white underside. Eponymous is a yellowish-brown chest band that stretches across the otherwise white underside in variable width. The Yellow-necked Mouse, in contrast to the closely related but slightly smaller Wood Mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus), which also occurs in many open habitats, is considered a typical forest species. It is distributed especially in beech and oak-hornbeam forests. However, for some time it has also been recorded in traditionally less forested areas of North-Rhine-Westphalia.

After the species had previously hardly received any attention due to its similarity to the Wood Mouse, the Yellow-necked Mouse was first recorded in Westphalia in the 1940s near Altenhundem in the Sauerland and during the 1950s also in Eastern Westphalia. In the 1980s, a rather sharp distributional boundary was noticed across North-Rhine-Westphalia, which roughly follows the line Cologne, Ahlen, Minden in its course. During the last 20 years a north-western expansion occurred so that the current distributional limit lies far into the Netherlands. Today, the Yellow-necked Mouse has practically settled area-wide in NRW. It is interesting that the species is found in the same habitat as the Wood Mouse with greatly fluctuating abundances of both species.

Author

Jan Ole Kriegs

Citation

Kriegs JO (2025): Gelbhalsmaus (Apodemus_flavicollis).In: AG Säugetierkunde NRW — Online-Atlas of the mammals of North Rhine-Westphalia. Downloaded from saeugeratlas-nrw.lwl.org on 2025/04/01