Thank you very much for the information. I’m not certain that it is a deer mouse, but I will say it looks very much like the first pictures on the first link - perhaps it’s very young? His eyes and ears don’t seem nearly as large at the pictures of the adults. He is very, very small for a mouse even - the body is the size of my thumb, and I don’t have large hands.
I’m concerned that it seems to be sleeping a lot. When it’s awake, it runs all around and seems very lively. But it’s been asleep since last night about 8:00pm, turning and shifting as it does (and at some point in the night it was a Bad Mouse and moved the empty TP tube against its water bottle drop, soaking it, so I had to remove that this morning…).
One thing this mouse did a few times was vocalize via something that sounded like a “grunt” or a vibration of the teeth. Definitely not a squeak. Any idea what that’s about?
I hope the little critter makes it. It’s incredibly cute. How do we know if it has hantavirus, etc. - do we just wait and see if it dies?
I won’t say I’m 100 percent certain it’s a deer mouse, but having caught several, the shape of the face (especially its “smile”), the coloration, and the build just look right. They do have a quite a distinct appearance from house mice (wild or domestic), and although the eyes on little Acorn are not so round as in the pictures of the adult deer mice, they are a good bit bigger than I would expect from a house mouse. (Compare your mouse to the pictures of the 18-day-old youngster here.)
It also does look young, about the age (and size) Ne-taro was when we caught him. Our deer mouse never got quite as big as the domestic lady mice he lived with, but he was more “muscular” (ick, lame Latin pun not intended) and sleeker.
Hehe, Ne-taro chewed through three plastic water bottles before we got wise and bought him a glass one. The sleeping doesn’t inherently seem wrong to me, but I am not an expert.
When did it do it? Were there any special circumstances? I did find that our mouse made occasional noises; in particular early on, when one of us got too close for comfort, he would “chirp” very suddenly to warn us to back off.
(Disclaimer: I am not a doctor.) I don’t know. This is something where I would suggest doing as much research as possible-- it is a serious disease and not something you want to mess with. Again, not knowing where you live, I’d say consult the Fish and Wildlife Department or similar to ask about deer mice as carriers of hantavirus in your area.
I would suggest contacting the owner of the Deer Mouse Ranch website for any of these concerns that you have-- they will probably be able to give you much better info than I ever could, and will be able to tell you if you do have a deer mouse or not. (I’m strongly betting that you do.) They have a nice care sheet for white-footed mice and deer mice, too.
FYI, if you do have a deer mouse, they can live quite a bit longer than house mice-- up to five years, if I’m remembering correctly.
As a child, I kept one the cats caught. he lived for a couple of years in a ten-gallon terrarium, and for the first year or so he was easily handled and seemed friendly – eventually he became skittish and nippy.
We gave no thought at all to diseases.
I’ve never had any trouble catching mice in live traps nor by placing a container over them while waving peanut butter on a stick near their noses. I’ve never had released mice return. I’ve found one mouse and one only, not an infestation, in some cases. Therefore my anecdotal experiences are absolutely contrary to many of the assertions made in this thread.
I will say that the mouse we caught a few years ago figured out how to force open a Habitrail and escape. Be sure his cage is secure.
Our escaped mouse probably fled – never saw another dropping.
Why would you want to keep mice alive? To let them go so they can spread disease and infest your neighbor’s home? They are pests and I can’t understand for the life of me why you would go to special lengths to keep them alive.
If you have an infection do you refuse antibiotics and try a way to lure the germs out of your body instead of killing them?
Doing some more research this morning has proven it’s a Deer Mouse. The vocalization I heard was a “drumming” that he did with his front feet, which is a characteristic of them.
Here’s the problem. The original thread, started more than a month ago, was about trapping mice. And even then, since the title of the thread was “Recommend Me a Live Trap”, your opinion (as well as that of others who urged me to kill them) is not 100% helpful towards that goal.
Since that time, the thread has now changed to “I caught one, what info can we share about it.” So your post at this time seems a little bit in poor taste to someone who has caught a tiny animal and wants to take care of it the best way possible.
Duck Duck Goose - at this point, it’s a non-issue. Any young are long since dead from either exposure or starvation. Besides, Una’s plan was to relocate the critter, not keep it. So even if the original plan had been followed, any putative young would have died long since, anyways.
The mouse is drinking and eating very happily, and has built a nest in the corner and is sleeping right now. It seems lively and happy when awake, but it sure does sleep a lot, much more than I would have thought. And it’s damn hard to take a photo of because I don’t want to scare it with a flash or shine a bright light on it. I feel positive about its future.
I’m going to ask a Moderator to close this thread, as apparently it’s going to keep attracting drive-by snark.