More mice
As I posted earlier, the house has mice.
We seem to have discouraged the downstairs mice, as we haven't seen any evidence of them for a while. However, they seem to have just gone upstairs. In my room there is an eaves closet which gives onto a storage space (it is now filled with insulation so not very useful for storage). From this door has been emanating little skritchy skritchy noises, and so I finally decided to take action. My last kill-them-dead trap seems to be nonfunctional, so I got out the have-a-hearts. I immediately caught two mice. Off they went, across the road to the lake shore. Next day, two more, repeat several times. When the trap goes off in the middle of the night, there's a lot of banging about by the mouse, who is after all sitting on the spring plate which gives a lot of ability for extra noise. So, I've been getting up and taking the trap out of the closet and moving it elsewhere behind a closed door so I don't hear it.
I did notice that we seem to have revolving door justice, because our have-a-hearts have a problem which is that when the door snaps shut it sometimes catches the mouse's tail, and some of our earlier mice ended up with their tails actually severed. (In fact, there were three such mice originally. "Did you ever see such a sight in your life?") And, I have seen a couple of short tailed mice in my upstairs traps.
A couple of days ago, I caught a mouse in the middle of the night, and moved it to the other room, and caught another mouse a couple of hours later, and moved it to the other room also. In the morning I went back to the other room to get the mice so that I could take them across the road like usual. To my surprise, one of the traps was lying on its side, and empty. Uh oh, I thought, the mouse is loose somewhere in this room. So I looked around, checking under the bed, looking under other furniture, shutting the door to see if I thought it could have gotten out of the room and therefore was randomly loose in the house, and then I noticed... The other trap has two mice in it! This happened because the traps are a little hard to open, and I don't click them all the way shut, and apparently the mice were able to push up the end where you would put the bait, and go in and be buddies. How convenient? Anyway, off they went to the other side of the road, together. (One was short tailed.)
They were very cute, huddled together. In this picture they were tired of being disturbed so they're wandering around. The "snap shut" door is on the right, and the door they had raised to get in is on the left.
I've been toying with the idea of getting out the official mouse cage we had for our Petco mice and just having pet mice for a while, but I'm a little concerned about disease, and I don't really want 50 pet mice, so some of them have to go, probably in a permanent fashion. Although, it's entirely possible we only have like four or five mice, given their ability to get back across the road and up to the house.
This entry was originally posted at https://nosrednayduj.dreamwidth.org/103744.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
We seem to have discouraged the downstairs mice, as we haven't seen any evidence of them for a while. However, they seem to have just gone upstairs. In my room there is an eaves closet which gives onto a storage space (it is now filled with insulation so not very useful for storage). From this door has been emanating little skritchy skritchy noises, and so I finally decided to take action. My last kill-them-dead trap seems to be nonfunctional, so I got out the have-a-hearts. I immediately caught two mice. Off they went, across the road to the lake shore. Next day, two more, repeat several times. When the trap goes off in the middle of the night, there's a lot of banging about by the mouse, who is after all sitting on the spring plate which gives a lot of ability for extra noise. So, I've been getting up and taking the trap out of the closet and moving it elsewhere behind a closed door so I don't hear it.
I did notice that we seem to have revolving door justice, because our have-a-hearts have a problem which is that when the door snaps shut it sometimes catches the mouse's tail, and some of our earlier mice ended up with their tails actually severed. (In fact, there were three such mice originally. "Did you ever see such a sight in your life?") And, I have seen a couple of short tailed mice in my upstairs traps.
A couple of days ago, I caught a mouse in the middle of the night, and moved it to the other room, and caught another mouse a couple of hours later, and moved it to the other room also. In the morning I went back to the other room to get the mice so that I could take them across the road like usual. To my surprise, one of the traps was lying on its side, and empty. Uh oh, I thought, the mouse is loose somewhere in this room. So I looked around, checking under the bed, looking under other furniture, shutting the door to see if I thought it could have gotten out of the room and therefore was randomly loose in the house, and then I noticed... The other trap has two mice in it! This happened because the traps are a little hard to open, and I don't click them all the way shut, and apparently the mice were able to push up the end where you would put the bait, and go in and be buddies. How convenient? Anyway, off they went to the other side of the road, together. (One was short tailed.)
They were very cute, huddled together. In this picture they were tired of being disturbed so they're wandering around. The "snap shut" door is on the right, and the door they had raised to get in is on the left.
I've been toying with the idea of getting out the official mouse cage we had for our Petco mice and just having pet mice for a while, but I'm a little concerned about disease, and I don't really want 50 pet mice, so some of them have to go, probably in a permanent fashion. Although, it's entirely possible we only have like four or five mice, given their ability to get back across the road and up to the house.
This entry was originally posted at https://nosrednayduj.dreamwidth.org/103744.html. Please comment there using OpenID.