Mice in the Walls and End of Summer

M

munk

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Mar 22, 2002
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Last night driving home I thought about America's highways and how much road we have that is still sparcely traveled. Enjoy it while you can. It won't always be here. In populated areas they can't build freeways fast enough, but here in the forgotten zone you can count the vehicles on the road with one or two hands. Like the California desert, lights shine a long ways off, and I saw the opposing headlamps from several miles away, looking like beacon fires. Theres something lonely about watching the light come closer and closer, finally passing by and the dark filling the windshield again. I remember when I was kid we used to visit the Desert in Arizona, and cars were so few you'd wave to each driver. "Hi, good to see you fellow traveler." We still do that in the Rocky Mountain West. I get folks waving to me I've never met.

The grass is brown and grey. There will be one more hay cut after the first killing frost, but the grain yeilds are just about finished. A rabbit crossed in front of the truck and I missed him, but the bird wasn't so lucky. Chock another one up for the grill...on the truck. This time always makes me sad. The air is heavy with remaining moisture, from the monsoon influence which made it as far north as Idaho Falls. You can smell the vegitation, a fruity decaying smell. Where will the rabbits go? All the small things; how do they make it each winter? I just don't know. Seems a damn miracle to me. 40 below and every Spring they're good to go. The deer are fat this year. It was a good year. Enough food for them and to fill out the tick damaged spots on their hides. They look good enough to eat if you dont' look too close.

And you always watch for deer as you drive. You can count the miles instead of using mile marker signs watching for blood splatters. The deer aren't quite as bad as the Sage hens and Antelope. Both of these species will run out in front of your rig, then once making it to safety on the other side of the highway, lose confidence in their decision and run back across the road, slamming into your vehicle and snatching death from the arms of safety. That's why they call the birds, 'fool hens."

The end of summer brings out several critters hidden most of the year. Certain species flower at this time, and the Box Elder bugs congregate on wooden walls. The wasp is active now too. And the mice. As it cools each night, a little cooler with each passing week, both mice and spider want to come inside. Last night I heard a commontion in the attic. I couldn't tell if it was bats, chipmunks, or mice. Something has to go. There are several gaps in the foundation I've yet to find and fill with ready mix. They aren't going to winter here with me.

I've killed several mice with traps, but lately have run into those superior mice that somehow have learned to lick the bait and not trigger the wire. Amazing. A real gentle touch. I saw one in the livingroom right before the bats did their dance in the overhead tiles. Wish my pellet gun still worked. I thought of throwing a shoe at him but figured I'd miss.

Peanut butter is still the best bait, but I've some cheese goo in a can I've been using since no one will eat it. Not even the kids. High in Calcium, the can brags. Well, nursing mice need the calcium.

You have to watch for Elk too. The Montana Highway department seeds the embankments with clover, so the tourists think they're driving through OZ. Trouble is, clover is loved by grazers. When you see a group of Elk in the road, make sure you slow. They don't move out of the way very quickly.
The turkey have returned from the backwoods with their broods. Young, football sized 'turklets' follow mom, getting ready for Fall. By Winter they'll all be behind my house again. I'm up against a cliff face and steep mountain which offers the warmest place against the winter winds. I can tell when a big storm is coming because the Turkeys go to roost early in the day right behind us in the treetops.


In the country you watch your life go by with the seasons. I'd miss the mice trying to move in each year, but will get as many as I can. "We love the munk compound," the mice tell each other, 'summertime year round and the living is easy."

The end of summer means the beginning of khuk chopping afternoons. Soon, the crew and I will be felling trees and bringing home this year's firewood. I still use khuks for delimbing and often felling. I'll buck the wood with a chainsaw, because even though I need the exercise of a good kukri chopping sesssion, I don't have enough time to cut everything the old way. Hat's off to a bygone age where there were no gasoline motors, and the elbow was the most powerfull tool in the Valley.

munk
 
Munk,

You nailed the season right on the head. Great stuff.

I drove back from Newcastle, Wyo. last night and watched thunderstorms across the badlands of eastern Wyo. as I drove. What a show! I love this part of the country.
 
Great read Munk. I can't imagine getting ready for your winters.
 
The older lad, now a few months shy of 15, can't stand mice. He feels silly about it, but mice just give him the creeps. Brim full of physical courage in most other situations, but mice? Yeeeeaaagghh.

Which makes it inevitable that he's the one who, two years back, had mice nesting in the walls behind his closet. Yep, they were dispatched, but not before they'd danced across his bedroom floor a few times. And this past weekend, a mouse trying to find its way indoors as our weather chills .... ran over Chris' foot in the kitchen. They've got an unerring instinct for chaos.

Yep, we got that one too. In the live trap - cute little bugger. The younger lad wanted to keep it as a pet.

We never had issues with mice in our previous houses - but something about Fredericton and a 150 year old home, and the traps coming out are now one of the harbingers of Fall.

I love the Fall. The air smells wonderful, it's cool enough to go for a long hike, and somehow the stars seem brighter. We moved back to Maple forests like the ones I'd grown up in 5 years ago, after purgatory spent on the Edmonton prairie. Every year, I've been dumbstruck by the colours I'd dismissed as a child's exaggerations. This place is gorgeous in the first week of October. I can hardly wait.

On the other hand, this year I'll have 2 kids in high school. Thanks God the youngest lad's still only going into grade 4 ... I'm already getting empty nest jitters. Life's been defined, for 16 years now, by being a Dad. I know that "success" in parenthood is really defined by putting yourself out of a job, but I hate seeing that looming. Closer than I'd have ever thought.

I guess that as autumn comes this year, I'm getting a hint of premature autumn in my own life - I'm only 45, but my oldest's now going into grade 11. And I've missed the chance to fill her childhood with a bunch of the stuff that I treasure about my own. But having an 8 year old as well, gives me another chance.

t
 
Fall can't come soon enough for me. I don't have the capacity to adapt to the heat that I once had. I spend my days during the week trying to get from one air-conditioned place to another.

I used to fall into a melancholy state as summer moved into autumn. When I was younger, I just resented the idea of going back to school. As I got older and had more to look back on, it was too many memories of youth long past, roads taken and roads passed, a drawer full of "what ifs."

We just got back from a family reunion in NC. Not too many folks of my generation, but my mom got to see her two brothers and a number of cousins she hadn't seen for awhile. I remarked to someone close to my age about how our generation would soon be the oldest. Another fellow I spoke with was a guy I knew from high school who had married someone related to me somewhere along the line. We talked about our last high school reunion, which I missed, and the next likely one - the 30th. It's been that long? I can't believe it. Well, see you next year.

Tom, I too have mixed feelings watching the boys go off to school again - the older ones' interests and priorities are moving in a direction away from home and the younger ones won't be far behind. Still, my oldest starts 7th grade and the youngest, 1st, so I figure we've got some good days yet.

Munk, good luck with the mice. If you catch one in your trap, let him hang for a bit, to show the others what fate lies in store for them if they choose to stick around the compound.

Eric
 
Mice always move in on us. Except when we used to own a Ferret.

He was an avowed vegetarian himself, but he crawled in the walls and between the floors and the faint odor of predator kept them all scared off:eek:
 
We had a field-mouse come into the house not once but twice this summer.... stayed a week the first time and two the second. Met the little fellow when in the early hours of the morning I went downstairs for a drink. He was on top of an armchair, and just looked - I (being polite) said "hello", so mousey then moved round little and tilted his head to look a bit more, before ambling away. :cool:
He was obviously eating bird-food spilled from a big bag of the stuff. Decided we'd best catch him, so tried the "tin and flap lid" type of harmless trap. After a week of mousey entering the can, eating peanut butter and chocolate, raising the flap (by paw?) and leaving the can, we finally did catch him at dinner and put him outside. :)
A couple of weeks later he came back, while the front door was left open. :eek:
This time we tried the "tilting tunnel" type of trap. Clever wee beastie figured that one out too. Eventually he was again nabbed while eating, and released in an old shed further away from the house.
Hard not to like the field-mice.... even gave him his own small water dish while he was in residence. :o
 
Nice atmospheric post thanks:thumbup:

Here in Scandinavia winter begins to flex its ugly muscles too,nights are no longer white and they are cooling.

In come the mice, and I believe they say where the mice go the snakes go too:eek:That makes me uneasy, they do go under the house but I still suspect they might get in too!

It is truly amazing that animals, plants and insects(those bastard horse-flies)can survive temps that here go under -30C. I rage at the hares that chew my unprotected trees, but they have to feed too and they show a lot of courage really.
Each season has its beauties certainly, but passing of summer is like watching an old faithful pet ending its days, a sad time really.
 
There's a lot I don't know- Snakes in Scandinavia?

<<<>>>>>>>>

Mice-
When I was a nursing student, I lived in a bad neighborhood in a thin walled cheap apartment. I woke up once and there were three mice nestled against my thigh. They seemed like pets. They weren't afraid. They seemed friendly. I let them live. I had mice everywhere. It wasn't until they got into the insulation of the stove I realized having them was a safety hazard. I set traps and killed 18 in three days.

I was even stranger in those days. I set the dead corpses outside the apartment, against the wall and the street. I hid a tape recorder under some vegitation. I thought listening to people's responses as they saw the mice might be interesting.
Should have got a NEA grant for that one.

mostly the tape contained traffic noise and an occasional shreik of recognition as someone spotted the dead mice.


munk
 
There used to be an old timer (now gone) who lived up the road. He planted a huge garden every year, and dug out his quarter mile long row of sweet potatoes with a modified forklift. Still made his own pickles and canned all sorts of goodies. When things got cold in winter, the mice swarmed from his strawed garden to his aging farm house, where they found ample places to enter and hide. During one particularly cold snap, he had enough of the mice & started setting traps. Under the kitchen sink. In the bathroom closet. "I'd throw the dead mouse outside, reset the trap, and just sit down when I'd hear another trap go off," he'd say.

It was darn cold to be steppin' outside in his robe and slippers, so he finally just got out a gallon jar of leftover pickle brine, and started throwing the mice in there. He figured that way they'd keep until he had enough to make the trip outside worthwhile. His niece came over once a week to help him out with little things & cleaning around the house since he didn't get around so well anymore, and was busy in the living room. He retrieved the jar (now with quite an accumulation of dead mice) from the kitchen, plucked one out by the tail, and asked, "Wanna snack?"

I don't remember what happened after that.
 
There's a 'humane' trap I found here in the West; a tin container that sweeps the mouse up into a small cavity. There are people who transport the mice somewhere safe. Not sure where that would be. Probably near a farm house where the owner hates mice and thinks he gets more than his fair share of them. I asked a guy at a tractor supply place what he did with the mice from this trap. He was buying one of the traps. He appeared like he knew what he was doing and this was all new to me. "You let them go outside?"

"Hell no." He looked at me like I was dumb as pie. "I drown them."

So, that's what I did for a time. Caught them live and then sunk the trap in a bucket. You'd see a few bubbles come to the surface after about 30 seconds.
Grisly stuff. All this damn killing is. I resent black flies for how fat and organ filled they are. Thanks for the guts on the wall, Fly. Then the mice...you feel bad about being a murderer, at least I do, but can't stand mice in your dry food, either.

I use standard wire traps today. When a trap gets too gore soaked, I toss it. I can afford to get new traps.

"Oh no," my auto mechanic said, "I clean them and use them again."

Yeah, well, OK.

Finding a partially dried and skull crushed mouse in a trap is not a favorite experience. Bring us the Laser, I ask, give the homeowner a particle beam from China at Walmart. Maybe they'll finally start making good toasters again when that technology arrives...


munk
 
i could never see the sense of smeared fly guts all over the walls or ceiling, bstrd of a thing to clean up, especially if the surface is porous. have since discovered that a good vacuum cleaner hose nozzle sucks the little devils right out of the air. they tend to hover in their traffic patterns around the light fixture in the living room even with the light off as the shade is light in colour, it's a strangely satisfying experience to see them flying madly away from the sucky black hole and not making it. those that attempt to land on the shade and cling on with all six hands also get short shrift. the light shade is a cone shaped cloth thing which hangs by gravity from a circular wire frame with the closed point of the frame down and it has a decorative tassel that serves as a weight to keep the cone's shape. flies that escape the black hole by hiding inside the shade, being reasonably dumb, frequently cannot find their way back out past the light bulb and die of dehydration and accumulate in the point, which i clean out occasionally when i notice them. also, millie has a thing for flies and will snap them out of the air if they get too close.

i tried one of those electric bug zappers with the ultraviolet lights, the pop when the bug hits the grid & immolates itself scares the wee out of the doggies, so it's only used during mass invasions and i take the dogs for a long walk during the massacre phase.

i occasionally get mice in the attic crawlspace, set std. spring traps, and have tried the 'humane' trap with little one-way entrances and a large space with a lid. i tend to forget them, but shortly after getting the humane one found the little fuzzies could lift the lid & escape. a few spare bathroom tiles on the lid stopped that. checked back a few weeks later when i thought of it, found six mini-mummies. they did not die well. went back to the old spring traps, which i wash in bleach after each successful hunt. peanut butter is the bait of choice. gave the humane trap to my neighbour lady who will likely remember to check it in time to relocate the inhabitants.

we are not a varmint friendly environment.

_______________________________________________________________
CAVE CANEM ET SEMPER PARATUS
Dic, hospes Spartae nos te hic vidisse iacentes,
Dum sanctis patriae legibus obsequimur

BlueMillieSig.jpg

If they don't want me to eat animals - why do they make them out of MEAT?
 
Munk,
Swarms of vipers(adders)here.Poisonous yes but not fatal unless you are a dog or something small. Also green grass snakes, not venomous but can still give a nasty bite!Snakes are OK in zoos or pet-shops but I can't STAND coming across them all of a sudden in the wild.All my principles of not too much violence to animals break down, start swinging that club!
Not just field mice (they are not so bad and dont stink) but those greasy furred house mice reek and piss over everything and chew cables.I use a baitless plastic trap, no mess or gore and notch up quite a catch there! shrews get in there too and voles which I regret. Last summer the RAT (not knife)family moved from the barn to the shrubbery in front of the verandah!!! Rats are a real menace as I can't get them to accept traps and poisons could harm other wildlife. So, maybe the snakes aren't so bad....(if they stay out of sight) If i lived in the house full time I'd get a cat, they sort out the rodent problem fast, but I dislike them killing birds, no visiting cats either. Bats in the loft but they are welcome guests and hibernate October-May.
 
We've had a few mice get into our house over the years. They were ultimately dispatched with an old-fashioned spring-loaded trap. The boys appreciate the resulting gore. My wife appreciates the certainty of death.

Eric
 
Late summer and fall is the time for the mouse baby boom. They are multiplying like crazy at this time of the year when food is plentiful, and the weather is in their favor.

I found that placing mousetraps outside of the house right up next to the wall is a good way to control them. This way one can get them before they enter the house. Lately, I have caught alot of them this way and have reduced the problem of mice between the walls. There were years when the walls of this house litteraly moved because of mouse infestations.

I also have two cats. One is useless, like so many administrators, while the gray spotted female does all the work catching. At 16 years old she still is a lethal force in controling mice.
 
Aint that the truth about cats; individuals. We used to raise Siamese when I lived with my folks. Some cats are natural mothers, others indifferent or even bad. Same with mousing.
You can call a cat a lot of things, just not late to dinner.


Adders? Not Pit Vipers, but adders? I'll have to look it up.

animals with poisen piss me off. Too many of them are capable of killing me or especially my sons. We're so far from a hospital a good bite might actually take the small kid, though thankfully the Western Rattlesnake here is small with a little head.
I don't know what I'd do if a Western Diamondback bit one of them....that's one of my biggest fears when I take them to the desert. Snakes can be anywhere. They love the desert with me, and I can't keep track of all three of them all the time. If you know the desert, you know you can barely keep track of your own steps, let alone someonelse's.

Carter saw the black mouse this morning. He's just too good at licking the food off the trap. I need a pellet gun.


munk
 
Adders, vipera berus, are the UK's only indigenous poisonous snake.
Viperaberusmaleandfemale.jpg

Linky

thay are fairly placid and non-agressive, you'd need to REALLY piss it off to get bitten.
 
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