It's not every day you find two mouse turds stuck to the side of your HP Sauce bottle and for that I'm extremely grateful (although I can't help having a grudging admiration for something that can crap and scale a vertical surface simultaneously).
I had an inkling it was mouse season when I was painting the shed because one of the little critters poked it's head out from between two bricks and watched what I was doing for a while.
This proximity to David Attenborough-type reality didn't bother me much because since a mouse ran down my arm last year and took ten years off my life (it was hiding in a jacket), I've toughened up a bit.
The one that poked its head out from between the bricks was only a baby and as cute as a button and if I'd had a shovel handy I would've walloped it, because before you could say "Mickey and Minnie" it would've grown into a big ugly sucker and started crapping all over my pantry.
As it turns out, its bigger friends have been doing just that, so at the moment I'm waging a war on mice and have discovered, courtesy of the back of the mouse-trap packet, that there is indeed a mouse season and it's NOW.
Unfortunately, of the eight traps I set, only one was visited by a mouse that was dumb enough to get caught. The other seven had the bait removed (peanut butter and bacon) but hadn't been sprung.
I suspect I'm baiting the traps not only with the equivalent of Nigella-type mouse food but also with far too much.
I don't want to resort to poison (to my mind, traps are pretty instant therefore less cruel), but I'm so sick of the little bastards my resolve is beginning to waver.
Maybe standing guard with a shovel isn't such a bad idea after all.
14 comments:
Trust me - don't use poison, because the nasty little critters run away to die in weird place, and you can never find them and your whole house stinks like dead mice.
Maybe try pumpkin seeds as bait on the traps.
Thanks Bel, I've always worried about the running-away-to-die bit in case the dog finds them and eats them - hadn't even considered the stink. I'll buy some pumpkin and continue the Turd World War with traps and seeds.
In the process of building my mums house the mice decided that it was nice to move in (lucky no pantry then) but the little critters would run over me while i was sleeping on the floor. So mum decides to get bait, good idea, but they do stink when they die and you can't find the little buggers.
personally i use a mouse trap with a little smearing of vegemite and when they are trapped at least i know where i put them for their journey to mouse heaven.
Don't give in Michelle.
By they way we seem to have got rid of the buggers now that the house is finished and i no longer have to zip myself up in a sleeping bag.
Awww baby mouse :P We recently got mice and now one of them has had babies. Awww they are cute aren't they? :P Mice are so cute.
...and smell really really bad...
Hopefully the seeds from the piece of pumpkin I just bought will cure all the cuteness. If that fails, I'll go with the Vegemite.
Mice!!!! We had a cat which was brilliant at catching, and eating mice. But, after the cat died, no mice in the house. TB (the boss) decided we needed a cat for the mice in the shed. Now, we have mice in the house. Mog catches one in the shed, and brings it into the house to play with it. If it's lucky, she gets tired before it dies of fright, and we have a mouse in the house. At least our other cats used to eat them.
Suzanne
We used to have three cats who were brilliant mousers. The pantry had no mice but looked like a shrine to St Whiskas. The yukky part was that they always used to leave the mouse feet, tail and liver in a neat row on the back doormat. Not nice with bare feet first thing in the morning.
We have rats in our corner of the southwest. And one died inside the boxed eaves earlier this year. We knew because of the occasional wafting smell of dead rat, and the piece de resistance --- the kamikaze dropping of live MAGGOTS on to the floor INSIDE the house just near the back door near where said boxed eave was.... Ewwww! It's pretty disconcerting to be sitting at your computer and you notice something moving out of the corner of your eye - then spy one rogue maggot hightailing towards the front of the house across your newly washed floor. So much for the rodent control person saying that they eat the RatSack (or whatever) in the roof then go elsewhere to die. Don't believe them!
Hi Michele, we've got mice here in Walpole too - definitely mouse season in the south west! I trap them because of the poison/stink/dog eating dead mice factors. I bury their little corpses in the garden so they are recycled! Living in the forest I worry that they may be little marsupials but so far no pouches. Anyway, I use peanut butter or chocolate to bait the traps. I've discovered you actually have to feed the mice up to make them heavy enough to spring the trap (theory, not fact).
I think I'll blog this as well ...
Sorry your comments weren't up more quickly - we've been in Perth the last couple of days. Rhonda, we had rats in North Perth and our neighbour was a big Ratsak fan. The rats used to crawl into our garden to die, it was awful. Eleanor, I think you're right about the weight thing. My new mouse motto: get fat and die.
Some years back I discovered the Safe 'n' Sure mousetrap. Apart from a metal spring, it's completely plastic, is easy to set without damage to your fingers and opens simply to permit the corpse to drop into the garbage bin. I hope they're available in Albany.
Thanks Richard, I'll keep an eye out for them. All's quiet on the mouse front at the moment but you can bet your life they'll be back.
Who needs a cat?
We have outdoor aviaries, with a caged in base with dirt in it so the Rabbits of Alcatraz have somewhere to dig.
The mice also love it, and tunnel to their hearts' content. I dug out the dirt one day (exchanged it with garden dirt as it is nicely rebirthed courtesy rabbit), and our Ridgback Shepherd cross got 45 mice in about half an hour, catching each mouse, crushing its skull between his canines, dropping it and going after the next mouse. Never seen a cat go for mice that quick and that effectively.
Also begs the question - are a cat's biggest teeth called canines or felines?
Boothy, I didn't even know a dog's biggest teeth were called canines, so God knows what cats have. Reading through everyone's comments again, I've come to the conclusion that the answer to our mice problem is to get a Ridgeback Shepherd cross, several hundred Safe'n'Sure mousetraps, bucketloads of pumpkin seeds and half a dozen machine gun turrets just to be on the safe side.
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