Mice are a fact of country life. My crappy old farmhouse doesn’t do a good job keeping them out. My rickety workshop is worse. Feed stores in the barn (for the farm animals) can get ridiculous if I don’t keep them tightly sealed. Ironically, mice don’t live in my woodpile. That’s the only truly mouse free place. It’s the territorial domain of the chipmunks (who loudly complain about my annoying presence). Chipmunks seem to police mice out of their turf. They also leave stashes of pinecone tailings in my stacked wood. I’m chill about it because pinecone bits burn and I’m happy the ‘monks stay out of the house.
Mice show up irregularly but invariably, in unwelcome spots. There’s only so much I can do about it. Even if I kill ‘em off, more will show up. Their origin is varied. They might be vagabonds from the barn, explorers from the subbasement, or wild critters looking for the easy life. Cats do an inadequate job keeping them in check. In fact my current cat is comically unimpressive as a “mouser”. Like everything, if nobody else does it, it’s Curmudgeon’s job. I use a lot of mouse traps because my cat is a lazy asshole.
Every fall, the dial goes to eleven! Things get crazy for a few weeks. As the weather turns cold, the outside mice invade. All forests and fields have mice so there’s an endless supply of critters just a few steps from my door. When it’s chilly, the mice (reasonably enough) start looking for better shelter. They wind up in my workshop or house. This annual wave happens sometime around Halloween and it always pisses me off. Luckily it dies down as soon as there’s a nice deep blanket of snow to insulate & protect the outside buggers. This year it has been seasonally cold but the snow is barely an inch. No insulating snow = a continuation of the mouse wave to annoy Mr. Curmudgeon.
Until the situation changes I’ll have to deal with an invasion; which means I’m setting lots of traps and swearing about it.
I feel like folks who don’t live near nature but dream about it need to know the annoying parts too. Just as suburban neighborhoods have monstrous HOA busybodies, quaint rural homesteads have mice. There’s a yin and yang balance to the various annoyances… though I prefer my annoyances to urban annoyances because I can and do kill mine outright.
There’s more to the story. Without bringing in a team of Rodentia biologists or going down a rabbit hole I have this idea I’m seeing two variants of mice. Some of my trap catches are a darker colored “house mouse” and others are a brownish tan “field mouse”. Maybe this is all in my head? Google certainly isn’t backing me up on my observations; so I might be completely full of shit. (Mrs. Curmudgeon’s theory is that an artifact of bad lighting in the places I set traps.)
It’s hard to learn from observation and I could be making up stories around random variation in fur color. Regardless the dark/tan variant idea is my working theory. I think the brownish mice (literally) “come in from the cold” while the darker mice were already there (probably scheming to chew my tractor’s wiring and steal the dog food). In case you’re leaping to your keyboard, I also know about voles and moles… they’re easily identifiable.
I don’t know if the dark/tan thing is true or my human mind recognizing a pattern in statistical noise. It’s a conundrum. The sort of thing I like to think about even as I’m tossing another dead rodent into the trash can.
In my shop, I have four traps. I set them up in a little Rodentia minefield. One morning I was in a hurry, I glanced at the traps and saw that one had caught a brown mouse. My only thought was “that’s a brown mouse, how many is that compared to the black mice?” I was in a hurry so I left it there to be handled later.
You have no idea where this is going but I do have a point. Stay tuned…
I have 10 stray cats that I take care of. Haven’t seen a live mouse in over 20 years…
Mice are one thing . . .Rats are worse
A 12 gauge with bird shot will quickly exterminate every mouse you see, and scare the feces out of every other mouse within earshot!
I completely understand your situation. Years ago, when my Brother and i had access to our family cabin, we would arrive to a cinder block house with several ‘residents’. We took to Crosman and Sheridan pump air rifles, one pump to reduce richochets and had a ‘mouse safari’ for a few minutes to those who did not vacate the house fast enough. Not a permanent residence, mainly resided in only on weekends. One common room of kitchen on one end, six bunks on the other and an attached room with more bunks and a bathroom on far end. That attached used to be a front porch, so T111 wood panels, some with windows was how the mice were getting in.
Sometimes, those mice were the only animals hurt. Nothing personal mice, but you should have got the hint to scram when the lights came on.
What made it worse was that one cousin who did not hang around to put corn in deer feeders would just leave the bags inside for us to finish the job. Yeah – Great Idea ! Damn mice had their stomachs dragging the floor, the pickings were so good.
jrg
i agree with ya on the color thing. it’s kinda sad that the damm things are cute but they make such a mess. kill ’em all let god sort ’em out.
I have 3 cats that like to play mouse soccer in the kitchen at night. The game goes on until the dog wakes up and eats the “ball”
We use the bucket full of water technique in the barns. Works great! The most I’ve caught in one bucket was six.
I use the buckets too. They’re good.
It sounds like the lighter, brown mice are deer mice.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=deer+mouse&t=opera&iax=images&ia=images
Supposedly they are native to North America whereas the house mouse isn’t.
Peanut butter and/or chocolate are the go to baits for the traps (or atleast for me they are).
Phil B
Deer mice would make sense if coming from the forest. Peanut butter is my favorite bait. I’ve tried commercial baits but PB is better. Then again mice eat damn near anything.
I always found a small chunk of slim jim my most effective bait. Stays moist, the fake skin holds the trigger well, mice love it!!
Mice in Texas carry Deer Ticks. Deer Ticks carry Lyme disease. My daughter has chronic Lyme disease.
Lyme disease is a serious risk. Your daughter has my sympathies. I do some basic stuff to keep ticks off me. I wear tick resistant pants 99% of the time and think the extra $ is worth it. Luffa sponges keep them off your skin too. Like a motorcycle helmet, these things reduce the risk but don’t eliminate it.