I Hates Meeces To Pieces
Dec. 14th, 2023 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWe have been having a flood of mice for the last week and a half, since the first really cold day. How many? Well, I disposed of #26 that we caught this morning. That’s the fourth that I was able to wrap up in the garbage bag it was scurrying around in, double-bag and whack a few times when it went out in the trash, which is honestly my least favorite way to deal with them because I can’t be sure they’re dead and/or that it was a quick death. We got five or six in glue traps, which mostly are the little ones—those get put in a ziplock and slammed against the bricks outside to end their suffering. And the remainder were caught in snap traps, which remain my strong preference because it’s usually a quick, clean kill. I figured out that if I lay snap traps at the entrance and exit of a bait station, it becomes a “mouse highway” and snags lots of them.
This is far and away the worst the mouse problem we’ve had in this house. My best theory is that the house on the corner (where the dude was leaving out food for the stray cats and attracting mice, and clearly had mice nesting in his basement) was finally cleared out in the spring. And apparently it was so, so bad—mouse shit everywhere. I think the mouse colony displaced by that cleanout have been living outdoors all summer and fall, and now are looking for new places to nest for the winter, and have found ways into my kitchen. And unless I want to have my countertops and cabinets all removed again to find all the holes (NO), I just have to keep killing them and hoping that any I don’t trap eat enough poison to die somewhere else, and they don’t establish nests here.
This is far and away the worst the mouse problem we’ve had in this house. My best theory is that the house on the corner (where the dude was leaving out food for the stray cats and attracting mice, and clearly had mice nesting in his basement) was finally cleared out in the spring. And apparently it was so, so bad—mouse shit everywhere. I think the mouse colony displaced by that cleanout have been living outdoors all summer and fall, and now are looking for new places to nest for the winter, and have found ways into my kitchen. And unless I want to have my countertops and cabinets all removed again to find all the holes (NO), I just have to keep killing them and hoping that any I don’t trap eat enough poison to die somewhere else, and they don’t establish nests here.
