For the first time in 20 years at my condo, I found a mouse. Heard it scrabbling in the wall, then got a glimpse of him in the bathroom. Put down a glue trap, waited half an hour and - presto, stuck mouse. I apologized to him and then delivered a very quick death.
What are the chances he was a lone mouse? It’s been several hours and I’ve heard no more mouse signs. Two baited traps are out but haven’t caught anything else. Does he definitely have friends in my walls or did I get lucky and stop the invasion by killing the point man?
Oh, I’d say there are more. Out here in the outback of Arkansas there are always more. I just had an incident with mouses(meeces?) in my garage. I killed one fatboy and it made a mess. The others didn’t return for several days. But come they did. I’ve killed about 5 out there. They came in with a stack of firewood.
ETA find out how they are getting in.
We started getting mice in the winter a few years ago (clearly they’d found or created an entry point somewhere). Traditional traps didn’t work – they were either too cunning, or too light, to trip them. I hate glue traps, so I bought an electronic mousetrap. Works like a charm, and every time we’ve noticed that we have mice (and I set up the trap), we wind up having to catch 2 or 3 before the food thefts and mouse poop ceases.
Rodents follow the scent and urine trails of where fellow rodents got in, according to my exterminators. Unless the entryway is sealed, you’ll have more.
My cat and dog work as a team killing rats. The cat gets them on the ground and the dog kills them. They average a couple a week sometimes more for weeks at a time and then it seems to die off just to start up again. Seldom just one. My cat is obsessed with catching rats and seems to do nothing but hunt them at night.
Not sure if you meant that sarcastically or not. But I’ve heard about people putting live mice stuck on glue traps directly in the garbage, and that’s just cruel. I’m sorry my mouse felt trapped and scared toward the end, and I made sure he had no experience of his death.
We have had mice 4 times and in each case they were solo; one dead and no more signs for years. I believe though that we are very much the exception in this; the norm is one means at least a few.
(I used glue traps and inserted them head down in a coffee can of water after a wack to the back of the skull.)
We live in the city, but our house backs up to what is now a park, and which was an empty field for a number of years after we first moved here. Despite that, we rarely have mice, and when we do, our cats over the years have been extremely effective, first in notifying us that we have a mouse (usually by sitting motionless staring at the stove for hours on end), and then by removing the intruder.
Historically our cats have never liked rodent tails, so whenever they dispatch one, they always leave the tail as proof of services rendered. Based on the cats’ behavior, I can say that in most cases we have had one mouse, and no more, during any given incursion. Of course, that may have more to do with the fact that we have predators on patrol 24x7, than being a matter of typical rodent behavior
Years ago we had two cats and a spaniel mix dog. One evening, one of the cats flushed out a mouse. The cats spent a bit of time batting the thing around the family room, seemingly passing it back and forth between each other, while the dog and us humans looked on. After a minute or so, the dog got bored with the show, leapt up from his bed and jumped across the room, and swallowed the mouse in one bite.
I just can’t do the glue traps. I don’t want see one alive and trapped. It’s bad enough to see squished ones on a snap trap. My cats would not lower their snooty noses to actually do me a service, like catching a mouse. OTOH, I’ ve never had a mouse inside the house, proper. Maybe they’re working on it and I don’t know it. Hmmm?
I once caught a mouse on a sticky trap. I couldn’t bear to smash him so I wrapped him in 3 plastic bags and put him out with the trash.
3 days later I was eating some chips and rolled the bag up and set it down next to the couch I was sitting on and fell asleep.
1 hour later, the same mouse - sans fur on the part of his body caught on the trap was inside my bag eating th chips!
He scared the shit out of me and I killed him right then.
He had eaten a hole in the trash can outside.
I caught a mouse in a snap trap. Only, instead of breaking its neck, it broke its back. I couldn’t bear to smash him, and I didn’t have anything handy for decapitation; so I got out my H&R 999 and shot it with snakeshot.
It depends. Where I live, I had a smattering of mice in the fall of last year. Since winter set in, most mice are where they’re going to be for the winter. I’ve had just one in the house all winter. Come springtime they’ll be moving around again and I’ll start catching more. That’s usually how it is. I haven’t been able to find where they get in so I just deal with it.
A few years ago we had a very harsh winter and I thought, “Yay! Winter killed all the mice! No mice in the house this spring!” I couldn’t have been more wrong. Apparently the surviving mice took repopulating very seriously. I had more mice that spring/summer than ever before or since.
Some ( I repeat ‘some’) snakes are our friends.
Mr.Wrekker has a ongoing war with varmints in his barn. He stores feed in there. Rat traps, poison, and squirrel shot are his artillery. These are not regular liitle mousies they are RATS. Big RATS. The traps are about a foot long and could break your hand. He concocts all kinda bait for them. He will sit out there in a dark corner and pop them off with his rifle. Sometimes I hear several shots and think he’s killed a dozen. He’ll come in and say he got 2. It takes more that one round to kill them. He says sometimes they look mad and come toward you after the first shot. He tells me they have personal vendetta against him.
He used to kill all snakes but recently has decided certain black snakes and chicken snakes will help him in his campaign. War makes for strange bedfellows.
As someone who grew up on a farm, I can assure you, you never have “mouse.” You have mice.
The hard part is next, you have to find the hole he came in.
A hole can be as half your thumb or less. You really are going to have to look because, it’s very surprising how little of a hole they can fit in.
Seal it up, I would use steel wool and then some putty or caulk.
If you can hear them in your walls, they’ll just chew through again. If you’re more patient bait traps work well.
Mice are very suspicious of food. They eat and if they die right away, others learn to avoid the bait. So it’s designed to kill them later on. Since mice are hoarders, you can put out a trap and one mouse may take half of it. He’s not eating it, which is good. He’s hoarding it. So he brings it home and then goes off and dies. Others eat the bait and go about their business and later die.
A mouse can die in the wall and it will smell for a few days. Baits are better off because you are effectively killing the whole nest of them.
Don’t bother with cats because it’s very difficult to tell if yours will be a good mouser. On the farm we had barn cats, and they lived on the vermin they caught. We never fed them. But I doubt our house cat could’ve caught one to play with much less kill it.
Our cat was catching mice in the backyard all summer but this stopped until last week when she caught two more. It’s hard to get rid of them all.
If I really wanted to kill them I’d put down peanut butter traps, but as it is it keeps the cat entertained (as long as she doesn’t bring a live one into the house again…).
