I’ve got bad news for you: You probably aren’t being tormented by a mouse. You’re probably being tormented by mice.
2 weeks…
If it goes on for more than 4…it means the mouse is smarter than you are, and now you have a mouse family. Then, it gets expensive and you will no longer get the luxury of saving mouse lives by live trapping and your new friend will die violently anyway. Your exterminator won’t play games.
Take a careful look around your kitchen and see if the mouse has not discovered an alternate food source. Look at any boxes or plastic bags for holes. The holes need only to be big enough to get the food out, check the corners of any and all boxes/bags.
Put the bird cage in the bathtub, secure the bathroom…don’t lock the door, just close it, secure the room so that the mouse cannot get in. Pay particular attention to the opening at the bottom of the door, make the opening small enough so the your nemesis cannot fit through the opening.
Put your traps where the stray seeds fall and bait them with Reese’s Pieces…broken into smaller pieces.
Rinse the spilled bird seed down the drain 2-3 times a day. if you have a shower curtain, loop it over the curtain rod so that it doesn’t drape into the tub. This will make the bathtub a trap in it’s self. Once the mouse goes in for the seed, it’s likely it will have difficulty exiting, especially in a hurry.
You should have your mouse in a day or two.
Nuke them from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
Just last night around 1am I heard an awful racket in the kitchen while I was playing computer games. I’ve had raccoons try to break in through the door, so I didn’t know what to expect. I peered into the room and there runs a cute little mouse.
Peanut butter on a trap, go back to my game, set the timer on my phone. Seven minutes, thirty four seconds later WHACK - no more cute mouse. Tradition traps are instant death (most of the time), no suffering.
I accept many creatures in my home; spiders & other harmless bugs get a pass, I’ve live trapped & released possums from the basement, ants and mice get stopped for health reasons.
Per Wiki:
“House mice usually live less than one year in the wild, due to a high level of predation and exposure to harsh environments. In protected environments, however, they often live two to three years. The Methuselah Mouse Prize is a competition to breed or engineer extremely long-lived laboratory mice. …”
(bolding added)
Either get serious or get used to the vermin. And its great-great-grandchildren.
I found a loaf of bread, on a tile counter with tile back-splash and shear-faced cabinets with a mouse hole on its top
I found they were using the flex conduit on the rangetop as a runway and coming out of the burner holes on the range top.
Clean your oven. Pull the top and clean the pan.
Put steel wool around the pipe or wire where it enters the device - and where the wire/pipe comes out of the wall.
Or get a cat or real traps.
Great. Now I’m freaked out about my oven.
I bet you have mice and not one mouse , can you see how it getting in your house ? It could be coming through a vent or drain pipe . I have seen chipmunks run up the drainpipe at my condo . :eek: I think my dog keep them out of my unit at my condo . Where do you keep the bird food , maybe you should check the bag and see if there hole in from the mouse .
Rats found my bag of dog food in the laundry room. I bought a large tote with lid from Home Depot to store the bag in. Solving that problem. But now I see their droppings in the kitchen and hear them at night on my pans. I guess its time to buy traps.
The mouse I had would also run into the hood of my oven. As it happens that was what he did the first time I actually saw him vs. just seeing signs of him.
Were they dead the next day? I like the odds of sticky paper working compared to the tiny trigger on a trap. But will I find a pissed off and very much alive mouse or rat stuck on that paper the next day? If so, then what? Whack it with a 2x4? I will if needed. I hate rats.
never mind. a comment on Amazon suggests putting the trap in water to drown the rat before disposal. thats better than using blunt force from a 2x4.
I just ordered a pack of the yummy peanut butter scented traps.
Those things are so inhumane. I’ve told this story here before…Without my knowledge my (now) ex-husband placed a glue trap under the couch. I was vacuuming before leaving for work one morning, and found the trap with a mouse stuck on it. There was no way I would ever just throw out the trap/mouse, so I spent the next hour carefully peeling the mouse off the trap, then peeling little bits of glue off the mouse. I gave him a quick snack and released him outside. I was very late for work that morning, and there was never again a glue trap set in my house. :mad:
I grew up on a farm and pest control was a part of daily life. My uncle had large chicken house (10,000 laying hens) and large field rats were a constant problem. They always got into our chicken feed. A big concern because they contaminated it with urine and poop. Skunks would dig into the pens and steal eggs.
We took a pretty aggressive and lethal approach to pests. But tried to handle it quickly and as humanely as we could.
I’m pretty sure it’s the same mouse. He has a pretty distinctive kink in his tail. I have hot water baseboard heating and he seems to be living behind the pipe. It’s covered though so I can’t see in there very well.
He seemed to be looking for a handout today. I’ve been vacuuming like crazy and making sure there are no seeds around. Lots of food in the traps though! Anyway he came scampering towards me, looking up, nose twitching, closer and closer till he was about two feet away, standing up on his hind legs, looking at me. He’s actually super cute and I sure hope he gets in a damn trap soon because I really, really don’t want to kill him.
I don’t get why he won’t go into a trap. They’re just little plastic boxes that he just has to walk through the door and find all the food inside that he sniffs at from the outside. He looks at the openings and then dashes away. He must know it’s a trap.
Little bastard.
Not you, silly! The mousie!
It does sound good, though.
After discussing with the exterminator folks after getting a mouse in the attic two autumns running: Snap Trap, baited with a cottonball that you’ve put peanut butter or nutella or something in the middle of.
Mice are very well able to nibble the bait off a snap trap without triggering it, but if they have to dig into the cottonball to get to the bait, they’ll likely trigger the trap.
So this mouse friend of yours decided to…ignore all of his instincts, overcame an innate fear of the ultimate predator…come within arms distance…and ask you for a snack?
b.s.
Did you watch the “Green Mile” recently?
That’s an odd reply. I did get a picture of him when he was sitting there looking at me.
You’ve never seen a raccoon, crow, seagull, squirrel or chipmunk looking for a handout?