So, as I’m sure you all know I live in a rickety 133 year-old house in the Blue Ridge.
We’ve had both our first real cold snap a few weeks ago and 3 straight days of rain (light and heavy).
What does this lead to? Correct. A bunch of cold and wet mice looking for a better life inside my house. For the last 3 weeks we’ve been hearing them in the kitchen (squeak!) and seeing them out of the corner of our eyes. They seem to be coming in under the stove and rummaging for food in the drain of the sink.
First we caught them. Lady Chance doesn’t like to kill them so we’d corner them and I’d take them out back to the woods and give 'em the javelin treatment.
Problem: who gets back in the house first? Mouse or me?
Solution: Poison? It is to laugh. We have a baby in the house. Lady Chance won’t hear of it.
So, in my old house I decided to fall back on old methods.
Mouse traps. And I ain’t talking about no game, either.
They’re using a pathway behind the microwave to transit from the stove to the sink. It’s on the counter in a corner so there’s what looks like safe space behind it.
With two traps placed back there I’ve bagged 4 in the last 3 days. Including two tonight.
God, it’s so satisfying to hear that little snap from the kitchen. It’s worth it to pick up the bodies and stare into their eyes.
Hmmm… I’d volunteer to go over and… scare off the mice (a few strategically placed gnawed mice do wonders), but I live waaaay over in Taiwan… where did you say you lived, again?
walks off, thinking of all the wonderful, juicy, plump, moist, sweet mice…
Well, if you’re in Taiwan I’d have to say I’m approximately 10 ba-jillion miles from you in the mountains of Virginia. So that’s probably out. Thanks for the offer, though. Kind of you.
Bagged another one overnight. And Lady Chance wouldn’t let me reload before leaving for work this morning because the cleaning service comes today and she doesn’t want them getting snapped themselves.
But don’t you fret. When I get home tonight I’ll be there.
We used to lay rat traps for the little buggers outside our house.
Warning: This is kind of sick. If you like animals (even the annoying ones), you might wanna just skip to the next post.
Them guys have strong necks. Boy how do they. One of them evidently was only “mostly” dead when I discovered it one morning.
Barefoot.
It could still run.
Luckily my rottweiler wanted to chase after it because it did pose a potential threat to me. So it ended up dead; as I recall, it was whole when it died. That whole “running around not getting enough oxygen” thing caught up to it.
Yes, running around. The trap would flap a bit, but the little bugger kept running. Good balance, too.
(I posted this another thread previously but it got all out of hand with nasty name calling between the rodent haters and the mouse huggers that I just decided to c & p it)
I live in a semi-rural area and every fall I have to cope with fieldmice trying to move in to my house for the winter. If you have ever had mice finding their way into everything in your pantry, or contaminating and stinking up the place with turds and urine, or chewing up your clothing, you would have no qualms what-so-ever in taking whatever steps you have to that will result in the little bastards’ demise.
No I don’t want to catch and release them, I want the filthy stinking little assholes to die-die-die. I don’t care if it’s humane just as long as it’s lethal. I use regular snap traps, and set out about half a dozen of them. When I quit finding them in the traps, I put out poison in the utility rooms and closets just in case there is a stragler.
A word of advice though, don’t use the poison first if you don’t want to play the “Try to locate the dead mouse by following the stench” game. It’s a game where even if you win, you lose.
I’m surprised that you are catching so few. Where there’s one, there’s a million.
I lived in a very old house in Purcellville, Virginia and we would set about a dozen traps around the first floor. Every trap would have a mouse the next day (dead, thankfully) and yet their little friends would still show up the next night.
The problem with setting so many traps was that it was hard to keep track of them all, and more than once my nose told me where the forgotten traps were hidden. EEEW!
Now living in suburban Virginia our visitors are more of the insect variety. Our first fall in this house, we had an infestation of what we called “Spider Crickets”; built like a daddy-long-legs but with a substantial body that would crunch when you stepped on them. WHAT ARE THOSE THINGS ANYWAY???
Damned if I know - and I lived in suburban VA for a coupla decades; now living in exurban MD, which isn’t all that different. Can’t recall having ever seen anything that matches with that description.
I moved out of P’ville about 12 years ago, and the town has really grown since then, making life difficult for little mousies. Hillsboro is right down the road AND THEY’RE COMING YOUR WAY !!
We had 'em when we lived in Virginia and we’ve still got 'em here in NC. I’d never seen them until I moved to VA in 1988. My husband calls 'em “spickets” because they look like a cross between a cricket and a spider. We had albino ones living in the crawl space of our house in VA too. Very weird looking.
We’ve had a mouse invasion this year also. They’re getting bolder, too. My husband was working on some tables in the garage when one decided to come out and say hi.
I work in a library cafe and I keep a mouse trap(snap variety) set in the utility closet. Lest you think this is a nasty place to eat, the cafe has no outside access of it’s own. But the library has just spent the last three years getting remodeled and rebuilt and that can give the critters access. For some reason we never catch them by the food(we get about three or four a month.) I think they come up through the drain in the closet where I set the trap. Peanut butter and a couple of Fritos gets them every time. What creeps me out is that they get killed but the food disappears anyway. Are the others eating it as their friend lies there?
Jonathan Chance, as the [sub]somewhat[/sub] Official SDMB Hired Killer[sup]TM[/sup], I hereby bestow upon you the title of Official SDMB Amateur Killer[sup]TM[/sup].
Sounds like you’re taking care of them pretty well yourself. I’m just so proud of you…[sub]sniff[/sub]…Little Jonny Chance, all growed up and offing rodents in his very own home…[sub]sniff[/sub].
Well, no. Really the only thing you get is the satisfaction of waxing 6 mice (which, BTW, is nowhere near the amount I’ve sent to their maker. But then, I’m getting paid for it).
