Mouse Infestation

(Marianne) #1

We feed the birds right outside our kitchen window. As a result, we now have a lot of mice and have discovered that we have what seems to be at least several or more in the house. We can hear them in the walls chewing on something (hope it’s not wires!), and my husband discovered a lot of mouse poop in the basement, which seems to be their home base. I just ordered catch and release traps that should be coming tomorrow. We will take them far from here.

Anyway, the interesting thing to me is that on a large bookcase we have down there, my husband has several shelves of food from when he was trying to lose 15 lbs. (pre-keto). He’s always been slim, but wanted to get rid of belly weight he couldn’t seem to take off even with exercise. He ordered that prepackaged “food” plan that you get from a popular diet company, and wound up not using all of it. The funny thing is the mice won’t even touch it, and last I knew, they were pretty opportunistic eaters. The lesson to me is that this junk isn’t really “food,” just salt and processed carbage. I don’t know how you can have a packet of “beef stew” on the shelf, unrefrigerated, for over a year before the expiration date.

Note: My husband has been with me on keto now for a long while. He struggles with cheating with candy, but has been clean for three months. Even with cheating, he’s lost all of the weight he wanted and kept it off eating keto.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #2

Mice are pretty smart, actually. If they are not eating that “food,” then I wouldn’t, either.

(Robin) #3

We used to feed the birds ( a LOT of them all year round.) Till we moved to an area with a lot of hawks and various birds of prey. So we literally fed them too… with a steady diet of our poor feeder and bath birds. I watched it happen enough times that I finally couldn’t do it anymore. I know, I know… nature happens.
We never had mice thankfully. Except when I had cats. They would bring them inside to play with, then lose them, and they would scurry away and the cats would lose interest. LOL. Gotta love cats. Seriously. It’s the law.

#4

We are Southern and farmers with pastures etc and we always get ‘those darn mice’ but I decided long ago, I put a ton of poison under my house in the crawl space and NOW NO more mice and I don’t have to see any of it :slight_smile: Yea I have NO issues doing this at all plus it is ‘contained’ as in not available to other wildlife under my home.

If a mouse won’t eat it, yea, I find that what animals want is smart…they know for sure but one dog will eat a ton of cheese and my doggie, the Papillion Bolt, won’t touch cheese LOL

(Marianne) #5

Exactly!

#6

Once we had a mouse and it chewed on my choir dress… But not again, we have cats now. They catch anything. Mice and voles (in big numbers, we live next to fields with corn and sunflower and similar things), sometimes voles, birds, lizards and once a bat…
The birds are pretty good, that’s a rare prey but happens. I still feed the birdies, the number of the “exploded birds” as my SO calls the bunch of feathers on the doormat (ONLY the doormat is a proper place to eat ANYTHING if one is a cat) never goes up in winter when feeding happens and it’s low anyway. It’s mostly mice and voles.

My current cats are normal, they don’t bring in live prey. They bring in dead pray, they toss them into the air repeatedly until they lose them somewhere around my weights and lose interest. If we don’t notice this but we usually do.
We almost always had cats and only one tomcat brought in and released a live prey once and he lost interest so we had to catch it. The other cats were mildly interested but not enough.

Food that even mice don’t eat is very strange “food”, I would think… Even the cats are pretty opportunistic and they are obligate carnivores. Never understood how they can live on today’s carby cat foods and all kinds of stuff people feed them. And they may even like it, our cats ate various stuff we never would have give them but we can’t put away ALL food ALL the time… Once one cat ate a lot of a traditional Christmas baked stuff, full with flour and sugar and poppy seeds and raisins. Stupid cat. And she wasn’t locked in or something, she ate as much as she wanted, basically but she had to eat that.
Now they rarely find such items so they eat my sponge cakes instead (almost or truly 100% egg, 16 “muffins”). A bite from each, of course. I learned not to be optimistic about where the cats are… It’s winter, they are inside almost all the time. And they LOVE eggs. Of course. I love them myself. Eggs are good. Only herbivores don’t like them. And certain humans.
But a stupid cat ate plain white rice from the pot once. Again, NOT starved. IDK why they do this. At least that stupid boy, the others are choosier.

(Jane) #7

My tiny girl cat is my best mouser… downside is she chews thew heads off and leaves them on the porch or deck. :nauseated_face:

My big Maine Coon girl caught her first mouse the other day and had it in her mouth as she trotted up the frotn porch steps. My husband pointed at her and told her she couldn’t bring in inside (it was dead), She opened her mouth, dropped it and trotted into the house! I texted my DIL about it and she said “a polite mouser!” :laughing:

We can’t use poison because of the cats, but so far they have kept the mouse population down. When I had this house built I had the spray foam insulation that dries to a solid mass sprayed on all my walls before we sheetrocked it. Not only is it great insulation but I am hoping it acts as a barrier to mice.

(Marianne) #8

Oh, they are beautiful.

I don’t mind the cats killing the mice, as their population needs to be checked, but it makes me sad when they get the birds.

#9

Yeah, and the bat and the lizard that they can’t even eat! One girl tried but just threw it up…

My girls eat the rodents. Usually. Mostly. We find some organs on the doormat now and then. Sometimes a whole critter. Sometimes the critter is hidden behind things and we start a search party when it gets smelly… Oh cats, they bring some color into my life when it’s gray or black.
We don’t have much problems with them though. Many house cat problems are unknown to me. Not choosy cats, they love the attention (don’t believe Tofu, the younger girl when it screams bloody murder when she is in my lap. when she had enough - after a loooooooong time -, she jumps down and very, very dramatically run away, seemingly super upset. she comes back in half a minute)… And we don’t have mice since ages. When we moved here, we had no cats, only the neighbor cat, we had a mouse then but the cat caught that too. But now there is a constant cat presence and it’s effective.
And they are super fluffy in winter especially Caroline who simply becomes a cloud. Softest thing ever, her fur and modern plushies are quite great. But she is simply better and warm and purring. Tofu purrs a lot too, between screams about me murdering poor her. Lovable silly thing, we mock her a lot and she doesn’t understand, doesn’t care. It’s good fun. Sometimes we meow too and she always responds.

Caroline is older but Tofu made her more kitten-like, she is more whimsical now sometimes.
And she has a new thing. If she catches a mouse (her zillionth in her life), we must go and look and praise her. Our 3 layer passive house door is quite good at silencing the outer noices (far from completely but it’s quite good, normal meows can’t reach us) but it’s impossible not to notice when Caroline demands attention. And when she is praised, she eats the mouse in a few seconds. She never did that before and surely doesn’t do it with all rodents (maybe she knows when she has a chance with us) but it’s frequent enough. So she is a proud lil effective hunter. I often see her eating mice 1-2 minutes after she went out. But there are fields just next to us so there must be zillions of mice and voles… Sometimes it’s a special rodent, not the usual ones. She had 2 European edible dormice a few months ago and how RUDE that name is, poor dears. They are super cute but if you ask Caroline, they are quite edible indeed.

Mine are just normal cats but Main Coons are super cool looking, I love them! :smiley: Some super skilled photographers make amazing shots about them… Making a great photo about something that stay put takes skills too but CAT photos? That’s like baby photos when they aren’t sleeping: must be super hard. So I respect such photographers greatly.

(Marianne) #10

Awwww! :laughing::hugs:

(Jane) #11

They are!

This is my girl last Feb when it snowed. Check out those ear tufts!!! She is a sweet snuggle bunny also in spite of her “wild” look. :smiley:

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(Robin) #12

Gorgeous!!!

(Kathy) #13

Living in a condo now, we are not allowed to put out bird feeders other then hummingbird nectar. The seeds attract rats!
Yep a good Hunter cat keeps the mice and rats away.

As for that package food, very similar to how ants react to diet pop, they will not touch it, but lap up real sugar laden ed pop. Should tell us something.

(Marianne) #14

She is a gorgeous feline!!! Her ears remind me of a lynx.

(Bob M) #15

We have nature’s cats, bobcats. And foxes, raccoons, ermine-like creatures, etc. Still have way too many mice. And they damage the house by eating through the plastic trim around the garage so they can get in where it’s warm.

(Jane) #16

We had a rat eating away at the wood siding on the pump house shed. We buried hardware cloth all around and I use the can of spray foam that swells up to seal it off. So far it has held. We keep the chicken feed and scratch in there but in sealed tubs. They just want someplace warm to have their babies.

When I built my “last” (hopefully) house I used the concrete filled hardy board siding and trim, so no wood or plastic on the exterior. My husband picked out the 4x8 sheets of stucco texture and it turned out nice. No worries about critters doing any damage! We could have gone with all brick, but would have been more expensive both in materials and finding a brick layer out here in the sticks. Any carpenter can install sheets of siding and the labor is a fraction of laying bricks.

(Marianne) #17

:hugs: I love all critters - except bugs. I would love to experience the diversity you have. We used to have foxes visit at night (screaming - scared the daylights out of me the first time I heard it!!!), but then we put up a fence for our dogs and we only hear them in the area.

Our “mouse hotels” (catch and release traps) arrive today. I am excited to see how many we can catch.

(Laurie) #18

I lived in a rented shack and couldn’t do anything about the structure. But a multi-pronged approach finally got rid of the rats and mice. Essential oils (peppermint for mice, balsam fir for rats), poison, traps, chili pepper sprinkled near cracks, ultrasonic devices (plugged in when I wasn’t home) … And, anything edible that wasn’t in a tin can went in the fridge.

Edited to add: Food garbage (bones, meat wrappers, etc.) always goes in the freezer until I’m ready to take it outside.

(Jane) #19

I’ve heard moth balls are another deterrent, but if in a living space you also have to put up with the smell.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #20

Interesting. When I homesteaded at Lake Laberge, Yukon, we had very little issue with mice/rats. I don’t think there were any real ‘rats’ there (ie Norway rats), but lots of ordinary field mice. We always had cats, of course. They had free range and I suppose ate lots of small rodents. I recall one incident in our first rough cabin, which had a floor of shoreline lumber debris of varying thicknesses that I leveled by putting various sized stones beneath them. One evening one of the cats ‘stalked’ very slowly and carefully along the small gap between two floor timbers for maybe 10 feet or so until she came to knothole in one of the timbers. Instantly her paw went down into the darkness below the knothole and pulled up a mouse onto the floor! That guy was dead in about a nanosecond.

A few years later after the original cabin had become the barn, it got infested with ‘pack rats’. These were actually very beautiful animals about the size of guinea pigs. They were mostly light grey coloured with white undersides and had big fluffy/furry tails, grey on top and white on bottom. They were ‘packing’ kale from the garden into the ceiling insulation. These guys were so big that the cats were intimidated by them. I had to eliminate them by shooting them. The cats happily ate them.