Three years ago, I married and moved out to Hubby’s place, which is in the middle of 20 acres of hayfield. I can manage the odd mouse which gets in the house.
HOWEVER. I don’t know what happened in Mousedom. We are suddenly plagued with the creatures. We hear them in the attic and walls, gnawing. Their scat has begun to appear in my cabinets :shudder:. I set a trap in the Dog Food Cabinet, and in the last week I have exterminated 14.
We don’t leave food out, or crumbs, or candy etc even in the kids’ rooms. All of my flour/sugar/cornmeal is in tins. The last drawer I saw evidence in was the towel drawer. Lint for nests?
Can I sucessfully turn the tide with traps? Or should I call an exterminator? My Evil Side [sup]TM[/sup] wants to put a snake in the attic.
Living in 20 acres of hayfield, it sounds like you have your work cut out for you. I’d try the traps first, and more of them (peanut butter. They love peanut butter). But if that doesn’t seem to be stemming the tide, an exterminator may have to be used.
There are some natural cycles of food overproduction in some plants, which lead to a overproduction of life that eats that - like acorns usually have a ‘bunker crop’ year every seven, which then explodes the squrill population. Perhaps it’s mouse food time.
Or that you have developed a big entrance into you house that the mice find, such as a poor fitting duct in the crawlspace.
I’ve used buckets of water a quarter to a third full (they jump out if its deeper) work quite well.
You get a coke bottle with a slit cut in it so it will slip over the top of the bucket with the lid over the middle of the water, with a bit of peanut butter on the lid for bait. Put a rag on the other end of the bottle to give the mice something to climb up (maybe even glue it in place), the mice climb up to get the PB, they slip on the bottle and fall into the water.
I know my instructions aren’t the most coherent, so if you don’t understand and want to give this a try, let me know and I’ll draw a picture.
We were infested with mice in our old place. Everything we tried, failed. We gave up and called in Terminix. Within a couple of months, the vermin was gone and we never saw another one the entire time we lived there (another two years). It was surprisingly cheap, too, $450 a year for four visits, and they did everything-but-termites for that price. I never saw roaches or ants after the first day.
I, too, live in the wilderness. It seems that we get a mouse outbreak about once every four or five years.
Get lots more traps and bait them with peanut butter. Wrapping a small length of string around the trap’s trigger and rubbing the PB into the string helps make the trap more efficient.
Get 15 to 20 traps. One trap will hardly catch enough to keep up with their reproduction. I make a list of where the traps have been placed so I know where to find them.
I’ve been able to get rid of the mice in about a week doing this.
The traps don’t ruin, so store them when this outbreak is over and you’ll have them ready for the next time.
(Do take care to place the traps where children or pets won’t get at them.)
Your local government (city or county) may have a “disease vector” person who will stop by for free. I had roof rats and the city sent someone out to give the place a going over and show me how to make my home less attractive to them.
Mice are much tinier but I imagine you’d get many of the same suggestions, including:
Go around and plug up any little holes they could be using to get into your house (foundation all the way up to the roof). Mice can get through some amazingly small openings so this may take you some time to complete.
Trim back trees and other vegetation that is touching, overhanging or within “mouse leaping distance” of your house.
Have the power company install barricades on utility lines (cones or balls on power and phone lines, prevents anything from using them to get to your house).
Now that you’ve kept them out of your house you need to get rid of the families who have already taken up residence, and since they could be in the crawlspace, attic, walls, etc. that’s where you might need to try the all-natural methods (kitties, pet snakes) or call an exterminator.
I had a pretty nasty infestation about 2 years ago. I demo’d my tool shed and all the mice apparently moved into my house. I didn’t want to use poisons or chemicals so I just used sticky traps. I lined them along the walls everywhere, on shelves, in the kitchen, underneath tables, etc… Found the majority of the scat in the basement by my worktable. So I then moved everything in the basement about 4 inches from the wall to funnel the mice into traps. For weeks all I kept getting were little tiny mouses, the size of your thumbs. After about 20 little ones, I finally caught momma or daddy mouse. It was big. That turned the tide. I only caught a few more baby ones after that and now have been mouse free.
My house is not in a hayfield, but it’s in a forested area. A few years ago I had mice in the overhead. (Hm. Sounds as if I was crazy.) I wouldn’t call it an infestation though. I got one with a snap trap, then put out some D-Con. In a couple of days the scuttering stopped.
You will need to look around your house, any hole bigger than 1/4" should be filled with a copper wire mesh, then expanding spray foam. Those little buggers can get in almost anywhere.
We had an issue with voles living and crapping in between the floor joists between the basement and first floor, they couldn’t go anywhere else because we had sealed the floor joists above the outside wall with styrofoam but when we had to remove a piece to run wiring, the stench was unbelievable. There were some small gaps they could get in, we shut them down.
It sounds sick, but the screams they made when they couldn’t get through the hole they used and the cats caught them made me vindictively happy
We have the same problem, living here in the woods. Our house is old and it would be very difficult to find and seal every crevice they enter through. We sealed up the enormous gaps in the kitchen and have five cats that give those little fuckers the smack down if they dare to rear their mousey little heads in here.
I think it’s just part of living in the sticks. I don’t LIKE them, but I don’t lose sleep over it anymore.
A big issue is cleaning out the places they hide. They don’t always live in walls. I once moved out of a house in the middle of a mouse infestation, and was shocked at where they had been living right under my nose - behind dressers, under the couch, in boxes in the closet and basement. There’s a real argument for doing a thorough cleaning of EVERYTHING routinely just to get rid of potential nests.
For safety’s sake, if you clean out a mouse nest, take precautions. Use a mask, make sure it’s well ventilated, if possible spray the area with dilute bleach and let it set for 20 or 30 minutes to disinfect, then clean up with a damp cloth. Bathe afterwards. Do NOT just sweep up mouse droppings or a mouse nest, as this will aerosolize dried urine.
Thanks for all of the good advice. It sounds corny, but it is nice to know that I’m not the only one who has had this problem.
This morning the trap was empty; perhaps I’ve put a dent in the population. It may be as Burrido said; the first mice seemed to be smaller. I think as a first step I will increase the number of traps I have out. I’m using a Victor clam-shelltype (which I had never seen before). One of the great things about it is that you don’t come in contact with the carcass.
I can’t go the cat route because Hubby is a Non-cat person. It’s a good idea though.
If more traps don’t get it, I will call my Terminix guy. Are you saying, Gingy, that rodent control is included in a regular contract? I’m a customer of theirs already.
Uglybeech: I had already been reading about being careful when sweeping up, but it bears repeating: one can stir up a cloud of germs :eek: . That’s my biggest issue with mice, they are so freaking GERMY. Yuck ! :mad:
