Wintertime - the time of year our furry friends come into the house. We are regularly awakened by the scurry of tiny feet and the squeaking of mice in our walls.
I have purchased some sticky-box mousetraps - where there are holes at either end and a rubber cement-like substance inside. The instructions say to put the traps along walls, since mice tend to stick to moving along walls. But which walls? Since the noise we hear at night comes from inside our walls on the second floor, I am inclined to think we should focus on either the basement or the attic, but thus far the traps remain empty.
Any tips? Thanks in advance - I Googled on things like “placing mousetraps” and got way to many references to “building a better mousetrap” as a metaphor.
I’ve always been able to figure out which path the mice take by looking for mouse poop. Look for tiny black pellets in your carpet along the walls. Or on your linoleum. Or on your bathroom tile. Or your bathroom rugs. Or on your computer desk. Or in your kitchen drawers (DIE YOU FURRY LITTLE DISEASE CARRYING BASTARDS DIE DIE DIE!!!).
Also, try to find out where they’re getting in to your house, and putting the traps there. They don’t need a very big hole–look for gaps in loose cabinetry, areas of carpet adjacent to the wall where the rug has been chewed away, etc. In my apartment, they seem to like corners–they chew away a corner of carpet and enter from the walls via that route.
Good luck. I’ve trapped two mice and my dog so far this year.
If you can get hold of an Ultra Violet light source, Mouse pee flouresces, you can see their paths they use as they mark their trails with pee VERY often. They can easily get through a hole the diameter of a standard pencil.
Put them in the kitchen if you’ve noticed activity, especially any “along the wall” spots - which might include on top of the countertop, along the wall, if you’ve seen pellets there - and under the sink if there’s activity there too. I’ve been dealing with an infestation at my house, and traps under the sink worked well. It’s an enclosed area, and so they seem more willing to stray from the relative safety of a wall’s edge under there. The kitchen is usually a major food area for them, and so you’d expect them to be actively hunting food in there at night.
One route of mousies into walls and other areas is pipe penetrations through wall plates and into cabinet backs. Stuffing steel wool into these small openings seems to keep them in abeyance, or it’s adding iron to their diet, not sure which.
The mice around here who get past perimeter cat patrol come up the stairs from the shop, so several snap traps with a dollop of peanut butter guarantee a winner every week or so.
Since everyone seems to have already given good advice, I will give you mine. Put the moustrap on the mousy heads. Or by a mobile mousetrap (aka a cat). I had a mouse get into my house recently and my cat, one that you would never thing would be a mouser, killed that sucker so fast it was funny. He was proud and strutted around the house with the vermin in his mouth before I could get it away from him and get rid of it.
We have a two story that mice were getting into. Unable to find any possible entrance below, I placed traps at the two upper access points - where the garage breezeway meets the house and where a wisteria climbs an arbor next to the house. I used DeCon bait and it worked both last year and yesterday. I expect to see a very sick mouse (mices) crawling across the yard in 2 to 3 more days, just like before.
