With winter upon us the field mice around my home have taken a liking to my garage. I didn’t think much of it since there wasn’t anything in there for them to get into and they weren’t coming into the house.
Until today.
Wife gets into her 6 month-old vehicle with 5000 miles on it to get to work.
First stop sign she gets to she applies the brakes and… nothing. She practically nails the guy in front of her. So she carefully creeps the vehicle around the corner to the dealer.
They remove a section of the brake booster vacuum tube and show her the little teeth marks where the mice have been chewing to get to the sweet brake fluid.
(Damn mice tried to kill my wife!!)
So, I guess I need suggestions on the best ways to get rid of / kill these mice.
Snap traps? Poison? Glue traps? Box traps?
We live in a 170-year old farm house, originally a log cabin. We have creatures coming in in droves when the weather gets chilly.
The plain old snap traps, baited with butter or peanut butter, have always worked for us. Me, personally, I don’t handle the dead mice, though. That’s why I have a husband.
How warm does your garage stay? My recommendation would normally be to get a snake, but I’m not sure that would do you much good in a Minnesota winter.
I typically employ a combination of defenses. I’ll scatter some of the poison cubes or the carboard wedges filled with poison in the garage along secluded walls. There’s now screening and blocks in every concievable opening to the house. I’ll put glue and snap traps in the attic where they chew on my HVAC insulation because, if they die in the house, I’ll want to be able to find and remove them as soon as they start to stink.
We had one die in the house from poison last year, unfindable, and I’ll do whatever I can to keep from reliving that.
Don’t use glue traps. They don’t kill the mouse and the poor thing either dies of thirst or you have to figure out some way to kill it.
I don’t like to use poison because I’m always worried about wildlife or domestic pets eating the poisoned corpses.
I think the best solution is the old-fashioned spring mousetrap which kills the critter instantly. Loaded with peanut butter, they’re very effective. Check them every couple of days to dispose of any victims and reset.
If you’ve got a tender heart, there are also live traps which work well and then you could release the mice into the wild (far away from your house, of course.)
I’ve found the most effective traps are the “black box” traps you find in grocery stores. I forget who makes them, but they are black, covered traps, with an arming lever on the outside. You bait them with peanut butter, pull the lever and leave them out. They cost a bit more than traditional traps, but can be reused easily. The trigger is less sensitive than some, but the design means that the mouse is going to stay there, stepping on it for some time.
The traditional Victor trap is also good, if baited with peanut butter. Victor has actually made a less effective version in the past few years, replacing their “three way action” in favor of a larger, flat pedal made of plastic that looks like cheese (for humans) and which supposedly has mouse pheremones. I’ve had less luck with them, but much more with the older version with a smaller, metal pedal and peanut butter. They are theoretically reusable, but only if you want to pry back the metal bar while the dead mouse is in it (yuck). Generally, they are treated as disposable.
Glue traps are effective, if gross. If you can stand throwing a squirming, dying mouse into the garbage, fine.
The worst are the flat circular traps, which don’t seem to work at all.
Poison is fine if there are no pets and there is a place for the mouse to decompose without stinking up the house.
On last week’s Car Talk, there was a caller from Minneapolis with a similar problem: A gerbil loose in his car (his wife was an elementary teacher). I was wondering if this OP was from the same caller, at first, but it sounds like it’s not.
As I recall, they just suggested getting a live trap and leaving it in the car, with something fragrant but not TOO fragrant as bait (you don’t want a car that smells of limburger). Of course, one of the goals in that case was the recovery of a live gerbil. I’m guessing you don’t care much one way or the other if it’s alive, so I’d second placing several snap traps overnight.
I’d go live trap and a nice trip FAR into the woods. Failing that, snap trap.
NO GLUETRAPS!!!
Sorry for yelling but I hate the things and I’d love to see them banned. They just cause totally unnessacary suffering and there’s no good excuse for using them over a quick and effective snap trap.
Definitely, snap-traps. Bait with peanut butter.
Strategic location is key.
Place them along baseboards and walls. As I was told by an exterminator, mice in enclosed rooms will often run along walls, using their whiskers to help feel their way.
Personally, I favor the D-Con Covered Mouse Trap. They built a better mousetrap, and I beat a path to their door.
They’re very safe, for klutzes like me who worry about accidentally setting off the trap and losing a finger. They’re very non-gross: all you see is the little rear end of the mouse sticking out the back of the trap. And they’re re-usable: just hold the trap over a Hefty bag, lift the latch, the mouse corpse plops out, and you’re ready to re-bait.
I’ve had luck with the d-Con No View, No Touch mousetrap. After dealing with using the plain d-Con and having that mouse smell stuck in the walls or accidentally stepping on a slightly dried corpse in the living room one dark night, this is a welcome alternative.
Isn’t brake fluid toxic? Maybe the problem solved itself.
Another vote for snap traps, and another hate on glue traps (horrible things). My favorite mousetrap bait was always gummy bears. Mice like sweets, and a gummy sweet keeps them from escaping quickly. If they do find the brake fluid so attractive, try dabbing it on the traps.
For trap placement, think like a mouse. As GrizzRich pointed out, mice prefer to run alongside walls, furniture etc.; they hate open spaces and try to always keep one side or their back against something solid. (There’s a word for it: thigmotaxis.) If you place traps under the car, place them around the tires, not in the open.
Mice also leave trails of pee everywhere they go, and a well-traveled route will have an accumulation of pee (probably droppings as well). You can use this information to find their travel paths, and place traps with the baited end placed temptingly in the path. Possibly a path will lead back to the main nest.
The bait is set well inside the trap so the mouse actually gets killed by the snap. There are no worries about getting your fingers caught trying to set it, and you never have to touch a dead mouse.
Buy at least six, two for each wall (skip the garage-door side, not worth it), bait them with peanut butter, and set them up right next to each other facing out. By that I mean, mice stick close to the wall; put the pincher ends next to each other so you can get the little bastards coming or going. The first few nights after you set them out you’re going to have to check them every hour or so as they’ll be snapping all the time.
You might want to find out how they’re getting into the garage, too.
We had mice in our old place. At first, my husband tried live traps, then let them out a block away. Inevitably, they’d find their way back to either our house or one of the neighbours’. We had mice so brazen they’d run around in broad daylight. They ruined several hundred dollars worth of food, and shit everywhere. We had a new baby and it wasn’t healthy for him, or for any of us.
Then we got Terminix. It’s surprisingly cheap (~$400 annually) and it takes care of all pests other than termites. It was well worth it and even if we had to pay for it rather than our landlord paying, I’d have done it.
