What? You're not scared? Just annoyed that everyone keeps looking at you like they expect you to do something like... oh... I don't know... maybe... catch the mouse? Thanksgiving night I happened to walk downstairs just in time to see a black mouse scurry across the floor and disappear through a seemingly impossibly small gap between where the wall trim meets the floor. Suddenly, so many annoying occurrences started to make sense. Those annoying little black things on the floor and in Spike's food dish weren't the remains of worms. They're mouse turds. And the hole that appeared in the previous bag of cat food - I know where that came from now too.
The disgusting thing is, as I think back, we've had a mouse for at least a month. Even more disgusting is the question of just how many mice might have taken shelter in that corner of the basement. Saturday, when I opened the basement closet where our holiday decorations are stored, I found even more evidence of rodent inhabitants. A plastic bag that had been on the floor seemed to have been yanked under the sheet rock. To make a nest perhaps? Thankfully everything in the closet is in plastic bins, so nothing was damaged.
I also have elevated Spike's food dish. (Finally, my exercise step is being put to good use.) After 36 hours, there's no mouse poop in the dish or on the step, so that seems to be working.
However, I still don't know if we've made any sort of dent in whatever the mouse population is. Jeff ventured out in the midst of the shopping frenzy of Black Friday to buy a mouse trap. Of course we needed the deluxe kind that won't inadvertently hurt a certain good-for-nothing cat. And so now a large plastic container stocked with some sort of reddish chunk of poison sits in the corner where I saw the mouse.
It's still empty.
Meanwhile, once we discovered that the closet was a favorite spot, we set out three more chunks of poison and shut the door. Looking in yesterday morning, one of the chunks was gone. By mid-afternoon, the second chunk had disappeared. By evening, something had moved the third chunk from the far back corner to just in front of the largest opening in the sheet rock, and by this morning that chunk was also gone.
Clearly, the mice like it. What's also become apparent is either we have multiple mice feeding on it, or this stuff isn't very poisonous. What concerns me is the thought that I will now have mice dying (and smelling) behind my walls.
Tonight I plan to buy some old-fashioned traps, load 'em with peanut butter and set them in the closet. I've reached the point of wanting to see bodies. This is war. I will not be outsmarted by a rodent. (I'll leave the disposal part for Jeff to handle.)
Oh, yeah. You have MICE - not MOUSE. (We've still only caught the one over the weekend with no sign of any more, which is surprising.)
ReplyDeleteBut I do have to laugh at your thought that putting Spike's food on the exercise step will keep a mouse out of it. Take it from your very experienced mother who has lived in the country most of her life, that little step is NOT going to keep a mouse out of anything if it really wants it. In past years we've had them on the top shelf of that metal rack in your old closet...on the top of the metal pattern cabinet...on the upper shelves in the corner where your bed stood...in kitchen drawers (remember the one a few years ago that moved Tootsie Rolls from a lower kitchen cabinet up into a drawer?)...and my best example that NOTHING stops a mouse from climbing is when I was a kid: Shortly after moving into Grandma & Grandpa's brick house, mice climbed up the outside walls between the concrete walls & the brick and somehow got into the attic. They caught 13 mice up there. Your uncle Gordon even caught one by the tail as it started its upward climb.
Your battle is on. I certainly can relate. And I agree...I'd buy some mouse traps. You may have to reset it several times, but eventually you'll win. I'd buy the old fashioned wood ones, because I have had way more success with them than the newer plastic kind.
I think the poison just dries out the mice so they don't smell. We've used D-con and the wooden mousetraps. Both seem to work, but I still get the ebby-jeebies thinking about it. The dog did a better job killing mice than the cat did.
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