Mouse in the house

Yay, we caught one! 

First off, apologies to both of you for not updating the blog in a while. I don't have an excuse apart from "sitting around doing nothing but playing Retro Bowl and putting on weight," so hopefully all three five readers will forgive me. Anyway, on with the tale...

We've been hearing odd noises in the kitchen for a while and only realised what was causing them when we started finding tiny turds in the drawers. Another major giveaway was the chewed-up seal on the box we use to store dry dog food. Ah shit, we have mice. I opened the door to this cupboard last week and actually found one of the little sods clinging on to the side of the box, happily gnawing away while ignoring me completely. Then it legged it into whichever dimension mice inhabit during the day.

Operation Jerry has begun.

We've never dealt with a mouse problem before so we weren't sure which type of trap to buy. The old-school ones were out simply because we couldn't risk having one of the dogs shove their nose into it to get the bait, and also because I'm not dealing with severed mice when I get up in the morning. We also didn't want to get glue traps because they're just cruel and I'm sure as hell not dealing with a live mouse stuck to a piece of card.

We ended up buying two of these:

It's a bit of overkill (no pun intended) and, baited with some peanut butter, they worked a treat, zapping two mice in one night. But then came the issue of emptying them... neither of us wanted to deal with fried mice so I chickened out and just binned both traps. I probably should have taken the brand-new AA batteries out first but whatevs.

We thought that was the end of the problem, but no. A couple of nights later we could here more scritching noises and realised we were going to enact Operation Jerry 2: The Jerrying. This time I bought two of these:

This is another one of those "no touch, no see" traps, which I prefer as mice are SO CUTE! and I don't want to see a dead one. Both of them were loaded up with peanut butter, set, and put in the two drawers that the mice seem to like the most (I don't know why, we emptied both drawers). Next day I check them, and they don't feel any heavier. The little tab that tells you it's been triggered was up, but as I wanted to be sure, I pried one open with a screwdriver. Yeah, one cute but dead little critter was in there. So, another two dead mice, bringing the total so far to four. Go us!

The next night, more scritching noises. They're also coming from the drawer thingy under the oven, so that's just great. I went back to Home Depot to get more of the circular traps but they were sold out, as were a bunch of other models. Is Vermont undergoing a mouse invasion? Then I spotted these:

"Kills up to 12 mice"? Holy shit, take my money.

In my haste to begin Stage III of Operation Jerry, I didn't realise that this isn't a trap. It's a bait station. The mice get in, eat the bait, and go die somewhere else. Judging by the amount of bait that's been eaten in this one and the one that I didn't photograph, we either have an absolute plague of mice or one supermouse that's immune from poison. If it's the former then somewhere in the house is a bunch of decaying mice, an image I don't want to dwell on too much, and if it's the latter then I for one bow down to our mouse overlords.

So we move on to Operation Jerry Part 4: At This Rate It Would Be Cheaper To Burn The House Down. 

These are the traps we have right now. They're catch-and-release, and as you can tell from the pic at the top of this post we've already got one of the little buggers (and as I'm typing this at the kitchen table I can hear it trying to gnaw its way out). The instructions are to release the mouse at least two miles from where you caught it... I never realised mice had that good a sense of direction. I just let it loose in the back garden, where it made a beeline for the neighbour's house. I consider that a win.