We’ve got mice in the ducts in our house. Is there any good way of getting them out before patching up any holes where they’ve got in? I’d like to use something that we can put under the house that would attract them out. Something that is not poisonous and isn’t as gruesome as those standard mousetraps - those don’t work all that well anyway.
I used to have a small manufacturing plant and each year the mice would come in looking for a warm place to live. The only thing that might work for you, but didn’t work for us was something close to the “Roach Motel.” The mice were drawn in and then you had to get rid of them. Getting rid of them is the problem. If you let them loose they’ll just come back and trying to kill them yourself is pretty gruesome. You would need to check traps every day and drive them off somewhere. Even your idea of poisoning them under the house is going to cause smells that you will find very offensive.
The best means is with a device called a cat. Getting one for our plant was what has turned a cat hater into a cat lover.
The cat method is a good one. If you’re not phobic, the snake method might be even better. Mice can’t hide from it in the ducts. The smell of either critter will be a deterrent as well.
How attached to this house are you? The insurance fire method might be your best bet.
Sorry, you said you did not want to poison them, my mistake.
Actually, I would borrow a cat if I could, but I have two greyhounds, one of whom thinks cats are snacks (as well as the mice - he’s the one that first alerted me to the problem - but he’s too big to fit in the ducts :D).
And the house is new! so no fires, thanks :D. Unfortunately there is a large crawl space underneath, which can be a problem sometimes.
The snake thing is interesting … but what happens to it when it eats all the mice?
The mice won’t stay in the ducts forever. There is nothing for them to eat. I suggest you use traps (either snap-traps or glueboards) in the crawlspace, basement, attic, utility room, and under kitchen cabinets. Place them especially near the dog food. You may also want to buy a lot of sealable plastic containers for all your food, pet food especially.
Do a thorough inspection of these areas first. See if you find any collections of mouse droppings anywhere. These will tip you off to the high traffic areas. Then place the traps there, keeping them next to the walls and also in the corners of rooms. Mice have bad eyesight, so they stick close to vertical surfaces to navigate their way around. They also tend to huddle in a corner for safety when they’re eating.
Some glueboards already have a faint scent to them, to draw mice, but just placing them in high traffic areas can work well.
If snap-traps are used, bait the trigger with either a dollop of peanut butter or a cotton ball soaked with vanilla extract (it works, believe it or not). Place the trap perpendicular to the wall, with the trigger end closest to the wall. This allows the mouse to approach from either side of the trap.
If you’re squeamish about traps with dead mice on them, I’m sorry. This is war, and they have invaded your space. Luring them out will probably not work, as they’ll just be able to get back in again. Don’t fool yourself that you can seal all the access points once they’re gone. Mice can fit through a hole no bigger around than a dime, and you’ll never find all the cracks and chinks, even in a new house.
That being said, it’s not a bad idea to try sealing as many access points as you can find. Exclusion is always the best method.
I’m a pest control professional, and I prefer traps to poisons, mostly because, with poisons, there’s no guarantee where the mice will be when they die, and you don’t want a smell permeating your house for a week because of a dead mouse. You also don’t want to risk accidental contamination of your pet food. Mice hoard their food, and if they’ve gotten into the dog food, they’re likely to stockpile rodenticide along with it.
While they’re unpleasant, at least traps let you know you’ve eliminated whatever you’ve caught.
Good luck.
May I strongly recommend what Davew007 refers to as glue boards. I’ve had a few battles with mice in recent years. I’ve never had much luck with traditional mouse traps or poison, but glueboards are wonderful.
Here in the UK, there is some stuff with the brand name Atrarat. It’s basically just a very thick clear glue. You spread it on a piece of cardboard and place this anywhere you suspect a mouse is likely to run over it. After that, it’s just a matter of time and checking it once in a while. Once a mouse has come into contact with the glue, it’s game over. It can’t escape, and if it tries to wriggle free it just gets covered in more of the sticky.
At this phase in the proceedings, you may hear the trapped mouse wriggling or squeaking if you’re nearby, thereby alerting yout to the fact that you’ve caught one.
Having caught your mouse, it’s then up to you to kill it somehow in as merciful a way as possible. That’s your mouse disposed of.
I don’t know if the glue is scented somehow to attract the critters. The instructions that come with the stuff say you can include some bait if you wish, cheese for traditionalists or some of Dave’s suggestions, but I’ve never bothered.
The glue itself is very messy stuff. You may get it on your hands or on any table or bench you use to prepare the pieces of cardboard. No problem: dab some surgical spirit on a cotton ball and use this to clean up any spills or any that get’s on your skin. The Atrarat glue is non-toxic, so don’t worry.
When you first lay the glue traps down, the glue does smell a bit. If this is a problem, i.e. if you want to lay the glue traps indoors, a good idea is to prepare them and lay them down early in the day and arrange good ventilation such as leaving doors or windows open. Then by the time night comes, the smell will largely have cleared and you can bed down for the night without the smell being obtrusive, and knowing that when the mice come out to play, the glue is there to snare them.
This has been very successful for me. I hope it’s the same for you.
Good luck, and good hunting.
Thanks for the suggestions.
We don’t leave pet food out, so I am not sure where they are getting food. The dogs are fed twice a day and they eat everything immediately. The dog food bags are kept in a large, sealed Rubbermaid container.
I know I can’t use poison with the dogs around. I don’t want any chance they could get into it, or eat a mouse that’s died from it.
I’m not sure I could go the glueboard route, though a friend of mine also told me about these and said they work the best of anything they’ve tried. . I could probably keep that away from the dogs by putting them in places they are too big to get into, but it sounds kind of cruel and nasty for the mice. I know, I know - I’m a bleeding heart, but what can I say.
So far the only place I’ve found mouse poop in the house is in the dryer, of all places. It had been out in the garage for awhile, so maybe that’s how mice got in the house to begin with. Not sure.
Has anyone used these kind of traps for catching mice? I live in a semi-rural area, so relocating them isn’t a problem at all:
http://www.tomahawklivetrap.com/products/33.html
I don’t mind paying the extra money for a few of these, because living where we do, I expect more visits in the future, no matter what we do now.
What you want is a multiple catch mouse trap. I’ve had great success with the windup type. (http://www.doyourownpestcontrol.com/micetraps.htm)
The mouse goes through the tunnel, hits a trigger, and gets flung into a holding cage. You do have to remember to check the trap frequently – if you forget, the results are very nasty.
What finagle said is true. If the trap gets too full of mice, they’ll fight and eat each other. Not a pretty sight.
Humane traps are all right, I suppose. But, as a professional, I’m payed to get rid of them, and as far as I’m concerned, that means offing the little beasts. If you don’t like the idea of them suffering, then use snap-traps. They are very effective if placed correctly in the proper places (I neglected to mention putting traps in the garage. Very important). Snap-traps provide instant death, and it’s probably painless as well.
You may assuage your conscience with humane traps, but I say wax the little buggers. You’re not really putting a dent in the overall population anyway. And they have it coming for invading your domicile.
Finding mouse poop in the dryer isn’t all that uncommon at all. As a matter of fact, I’d bet anything that’s how they’re making their way into your home- they get in through the outside vent.
At least that’s what they did when I was growing up. Every once in a while we’d get a mouse loose in the house. It’d send my mom into a state and she’d demand that my father try to find out how they were getting in. He’d feebly look around for a bit until my mom calmed down. In all his supposed looking around times, he never once stopped the problem.
But that all changed one memorable afternoon when my mother was folding laundry. As she reached in to grab a handful of clothes, a mouse darted out of the dryer and took off across the floor.
My mom wasn’t going to have any part of that. She made my father call in the reinforcements. He had an exterminator come out and look around. The guy basically explained to my mother that mice sometimes get into the house by working their way through the dryer vent.
She had that sucker remanufactured and reconfigured in two seconds flat! There wasn’t a mouse out there that was going to be able to get in through that vent after that.
So, I’d check out that dryer vent if I were you.
Finally, I did a nice little write up on the horrors of glue traps only last week in this forum. The damn things work great, but they come at a cost- it isn’t a pleasant thing finding a mouse stuck on one.
Plug up where they’re getting in first, then start getting rid of them from your home anyway possible. If you’re really gung-ho on the humane method, make your way to a hardware store and look at their humane traps. There’s a variety of designs out there- the flinging door kind explained above, a trap that works on pivot point kind of thing (Interesting concept, that trap), and some others that basically don’t harm the mouse.
In my case, since I can’t stand mice, I’d try to either kill the mouse quickly- with the regular old trap method- or humanely capture the thing and then kill it.
Releasing that thing into the wild just seems like a waste of time. Kill it, but do it humanely.
That’s why I suggested snap-traps. The only reason people say they don’t work that well is because they didn’t use them properly (see my post on proper snap-trap placement, above). I’ve had great success with them, and they are the quickest, most humane way to kill them. Although I don’t know how many psi are generated by the spring and bar, I do know that they snap so fast the mouse doesn’t know what hit it.
On the other hand, I’ve used the large economy-sized rat glueboards and had multiple catches – up to four mice on one board! For a guy like me, that’s like hitting the trifecta.
Granted, if you come across a live mouse stuck to a board, it’s pretty disconcerting, but just carry a plastic bag with you and pop the whole thing into it, smack it on the floor a few times, then throw it out.
Come on, are you a man or a. . . hmm. Never mind.
Well, this has all been pretty enlightening. Thanks for all the info, everybody. Unfortunately (at least in this instance), I think mice are cute, so I just can’t kill 'em. Now, if they were cockroaches … well then we’d be having a different conversation :).
I’ll be checking out the dryer vent and taking a look at some traps this weekend.
This is a good solution. A similar one worked a treat in my house.
From what I know, the jury’s still out on these devices. Some folks (such as yourself) claim they solved the problem. Others say it was a waste of money. It may be that some models work better than others.
My own theory on ultrasonic pest-repellants is that they may work in the short term. But so will a thorough cleaning. What you’re doing is altering their environment, causing them to avoid areas they previously visited.
But if a condition persists, it ceases to be an alteration. If they become acclimated to the ultasonic waves, they may accept it as part of the environment, adapt, and you’re back where you started.
The above is just my speculation, though. You may wish to try them, and you may find they work. All I know is, once a mouse is killed in a trap, that particular mouse will never return.
This is a house I only moved into recently so you may be right. In a previous house, I caught mice in traps over a long period without ever seeming to get rid of them completely. In this house I set a couple of traps and caught a few of our furry friends. I re-set the traps and plugged in the electromagnetic/ultrasonic device. I haven’t seen any signs of mice since. Anyway, time will tell.
I’ve had good luck with live traps. I live in NYC, and the local mice appear to recognize snap-traps, even when correctly placed as decribed above. The only time snap-traps are useful around here is when placed DIRECTLY in front of the hole so they can’t get by without tripping them. The live traps, however, don’t seem to trigger any mouse-brain alarms. In my experience (and I don’t know if this is a NYC mouse characteristic), mice are highly carniverous. They ignore peanut butter, cheese, etc, and go directly for fresh, aromatic bacon. I’ve killed more mice by baiting traps with leftover Kentucky Fried Chicken than anything else.
mischievous
p.s. I stick the whole live trap into a freezer, come back in the morning for the mouscicle. I justify this to myself by reading human near-freezing-to-death experiences, which generally sound like “at first it was unconfortable, but then I just felt like I wanted to go to sleep.”
Good God man, freezing the beasties alive!?!
I sure hope you have some extra karma built up in other areas of your life to make up for that move.
It’s kind of funny, though…
Yes, I’ve heard that mice like bacon (haven’t heard the one about the KFC, though). They like chocolate, too, and I’ve had secretaries who keep little dishes of Hershey Kisses on their desks, then are aghast when they find chewed-up foil wrapping and mouse turds on their blotters.
Of course, it’s easier for me to carry a jar of peanut butter in the Exterminator-mobile than a rack of bacon or a bucket of chicken, so that’s what I use, with pretty good results.
Chocolate? Peanut butter?
Reeses Peanut Butter Cups! That’s what I always used, with good results.
'Course the cat works much better.