Aw crap - mouse crap!

[zandperl]

Cleaning out the bottom of Kappa's cage today, I found mouse poop in the papers. !!! Kappa's cage is set up so that the tray in the bottom is lined with newspaper, then there's a grill on top of that, and another layer of papers on top of the grill. The papers on top of the grill get changed at least twice a week, the papers in the tray get

Comments

[stainedfeathers]

I feel your pain. We had starlings roosting in our roof for a while. They'd make scritchy noises that scared my bird in the night randomly. I finally got the appartment manager to do something about them when I heard something up there eating them (I think it was a cat or a snake, but the starlings we definitely a few less in number by the racket that went on that night...) Well, apparently there weren't just starlings up there. The birds can no longer get in but every few days I'll hear something scritchy with four legs moving around in my roof. It scares the ever living piss out of Aya, my sun conure, and he flys around his cage in a panic, banging into the walls of it and falling on the bottom. Far as I can tell, the mice/rats/something-scritchy-this-way-comes has not come into my appartment- I've found no droppings. What really scares me is if a snake decides that the critters in my roof may taste good and then discover that there's a nice caged bird inside the appartment that might also make a nice meal.

All in all, I'm rather displeased with my roof critters right now and my answer to the hazards posed by mice to a bird is this: I don't know what disease hazards they may present, but I do know that where there's prey there's also predators. I worry a predator (namely snakes) might find it's way into my appartment and think my bird is on the menu as well. A bit paranoid but not so far fetched, especially since there was something eating the starlings in my roof...