Just to continue, it’s not like any mouse I ever see up in the mountains. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that that picture is of a pack rat.
I consulted the cat and she says it isn’t a shrew or a boxelder beetle…not that that helps.
I vote mouse, too. I had a rat in my dorm room one year…it came with the roommate as an illegal pet. Rats are big and ugly. Mice are small and fuzzy. I vote for illegal pet as the source.
Definitely not a pack rat. Pack rats have hairy tails. In fact, the apparently mostly hairless tail is what makes it probable that this is a House Mouse Mus musculus (assuming SanibalMan is in the US, which I think he is). Nearly all native US rodents, especially those likely to be found in habitations, have hairier tails than this animal.
Most small rodents look pretty much the same to the layperson, so IDs base on it “'looking like” something are probably not going to be much use. The clincher would be to see if the incisors were notched or not - if they are not, it’s a House Mouse - but I assume SanibelMan doesn’t still have the critter.
While it is not impossible that both rats and mice are present in the dorm, people’s estimates of size when they see a rodent scurrying by are notoriously unreliable. (“I swear that rat was as big as a house cat!”)
Just for future reference, it’s a lot easier to ID things from photos if there’s something in the picture to give scale. If you don’t have a ruler drop a quarter or something else of fixed size next to the corpse, or whatever.
I agree this is a mouse; pointiness of the nose, slenderness of the tail, general fineness of structure point to mouse. The color is a bit brownish for a house mouse, but not unusually so. All the field mice I’ve ever seen had white feet and bellies, which this guy hasn’t got.
If this critter is the offspring of someone’s escaped pet that bred with a house mouse, that could explain the color. However, escaped pet mice usually become cat food or die of thirst in short order; I’ve seen what happens when lab mice escape, and I can tell you domesticated mice have the survival skills of a pet rock.
As for why they’re only on the fourth floor, is there an attic or utility space up top they could be nesting in? Are the fourth-floor tenants particularly sloppy about their garbage, or forgetful about leaving food around? Did someone move out and leave a food stash? Is some sentimental soul feeding the little darlings? Or have the lower tenants just not noticed them yet?
Having seen both (including warehouse rats shudder), I say it’s a mouse. Try baiting them with peanut butter.
Rats actually make surprisingly good pets. Rather clean (if they do not have to live in a sewer), sociable by nature and pretty resilient. They seem smarter, at least the ones I have been around, than I would have guessed too. The tail is the ugliest part…otherwise they are kinda cute (not as cute as a mouse I’ll admit). I will say one friend had a white rat with beady red eyes…those red eyes were spooky but the rat was very friendly.
I think rats are more attractive than mice. OTOH, I don’t like small fast moving critters, so much smaller than a rat freaks me out a little.
But yeah, the fella in the photo is a mouse. I know a fairly large field mouse, who also visits via dishwasher, and though he’s not hand size, he’s a good three, three and a half inches from snout to butt. Add in the tail, and someone freaked out might claim he was “as big as my hand.”
This one was nocturnal, keeping us up all night, and smelled bad since the roommate didn’t clean its too-small cage very often. Maybe they are good pets in general, but this situation was bad.
Mice are pretty damned cute when they aren’t gnawing through all of your floorboards and fouling your food and leaving pee trails everywhere they go. Oh, and shitting everywhere, too.
Thank you all for your help. Your reward is a link to the story.
I thought you said you were with the Wall Street Journal.
Good story. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and I hurled in the middle.
Well-written. I hope the administration keeps on it. We had success with an exterminator laying out not only glue boards, but bait traps as well. It took about three months before we saw no more mouse evidence.
Those glue boards work pretty well. One year, *they * plowed the field across the street from my apartment and all the field mice decided to move in. It was horrible. I caught 40 mice in 30 days on those glue boards.
Of course, you have to throw the little guys away in a terribly pathetic state, slowly dying in a shallow man-made tar pit.
I couldn’t do it that way myself. I thought it more humane to place the board in the trash can and issue death by pellet gun.
I’m such a puff, I even gave a couple of them a last meal.