Mouse trap

It seems appropriate as my little fur baby turns 21 today (yes! 21!) to write about the pests I hinted at in my last two posts. We have had mice problems periodically for a long time in this house. It's an older home with a yard, trees, etc. and, try as we might to seal it up, they always find a way in. But it hasn't typically been a problem because:

2012 picture of my mouser

The only time a mouse made it into our house for real (as opposed to our old breezeway which wasn't even sort of sealed off from the outside) was the harrowing 29 days when this little guy went missing in late 2015.

But our little fur baby has put in his time, and his mousing is not quite up to snuff these days, as he's mostly (if not totally) deaf and a little slow and creaky (but still amazingly fit and healthy for his age). And so back in August, grandma was housesitting for us and sent me a note to say she'd seen a mouse run into the living room (this while she was sitting next to her small, perfectly capable dog, but oh well). It wasn't that we didn't believe her, but we were a little skeptical. We had seen no signs of a mouse eating our food, though we did leave cat food out all night and we had recently noticed an uptick in our cat's appetite...The bowl was now empty many mornings. Hm...

When we got back, and always in the pursuit of hard data, we put up a camera near the cat bowl to see what we could. Many days passed with only the only motion detected being that of our cat. We wondered if grandma had been seeing things. And then:

There were even some videos of a mouse eating some cat food and then scurrying away for a few moments while the cat came in to eat and then coming back to eat more. So I guess our little mouser isn't quite up to the task anymore.

Our first step was to move the cat bowl around and try our best to figure out where the mice were coming in from, but after a couple weeks of this (moving the bowl to the sun room, living room, etc. all while adjusting the camera), we were no closer to figuring out their source.

It was time to start catching them, even if we couldn't figure out how they were getting in. We put out our humane traps, which actually did catch a mouse pretty quickly. 

It also proved to us that he had friends. Another mouse entered video to figure out where his buddy was and how to get him out. Great....

We also realized that they were scurrying out from under the stove/oven and, sure enough, when we moved it out from the wall, we saw a LOT of poo. I had a picture for that but decided it was probably best for you to use your imagination. You're welcome.

We freed that mouse far from our home and then tried again. This time, they were too smart. We never caught anyone else. It was time to call in some professional help and--distressingly--some professional traps. So for a while, we have had to live with a bunch of snap traps, covered at least by a box so no one would accidentally snap them on a finger or toe. Or see something gross when we came down for breakfast in the morning.

And sure enough, these caught some of our visitors. Four in all, so far. Two the very first night that the kill traps went out, then a big one a while later that was maybe living in our walls for a while with all the hoarded food (since we didn't catch him on camera in the interim), then one in the basement.

Our professional pest control expert had one suspicion of how these mice are getting in after looking around the house both inside and out. After all, we've done a lot of work over the years to seal the house up (for energy efficiency as much as for pest control). It turned out that when we had our siding replaced this spring, they did not properly seal the hole where our AC piping goes into the house.

The timing checks out. And we've sealed it up now. So far, so good. But we still have the traps out and set up the camera most nights, after finding basement mouse only 3 weeks ago. We're not quite sure how to know we're done. But however long it takes, our little birthday boy definitely has earned his retirement skritches and getting to keep his food out for whenever he wants to eat.