[FRIAM] keep getting mice.
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Tue Jan 3 17:20:12 EST 2023
Gil -
Ferrets can be very unpleasant to smell... I had a stepdaughter who
kept two (along with a half-dozen cats and gawd knows what other
pet-hoarding my mind has blanked on over 30 years ago). They also are
totally nocturnal and will romp *all night*, especially if there are
more than one (or have a cat or a dog to harass/play with). I'm sure
ferrets (if they get outside) are hell on birds (especially eggs?),
housecats (if they get outside) can be pretty bad too. I think Ferrets
will consume their prey unlike cats who will play with them for hours
and hours and then bring at least a partial carcass to you as a gift.
Snakes even more better at full-consumption, I understand they can
defer defecation until 99% is digested?...
I'm too frugal to throw kill-traps away, but you could follow Tom's
advice and I'd bet by the time you threw a dozen traps (with
head-crushed mice in them) into the trash, you might be done with them
(for this season)... or a handful of kill traps re-used nightly might
rid you over a week's time. I don't know how territorial they are but
I get the feeling that I never have more than *one* family in my house
when they do infiltrate... but their reproduction rate is pretty
extreme and one family can become dozens in a short time.
On 1/3/23 2:47 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> Steve, those are all great tips. I'll run a fine tooth come through
> the house. Their's this area by the coffee maker at the front they try
> to hide in as well as I think somehow behind a rubermaid recycle bin.
> lol a ferret? not a bad idea. Kim swears by his pet cat for keeping
> mice out. LOL one of my doctors tells me how his pet beagle chases
> mice around. I guess the pooch also OCD's on anything not Human and
> barks or tries to hunt them. I've read tht ferrets can make preem
> pets, as long as you can keep them from getting bored. I think Santa
> Fe isn't fond of people having them forpets something about birds.
>
> On Tue, Jan 3, 2023 at 2:18 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
>
> Gil -
>
> To misquote Leonard Cohen: "There is a crack in everything, that
> is how the mice get in".
>
> I have lived with mouse-flux all of my time in my current
> (rural)property 20 years). The mice (and ground squirrels and
> packrats) in the environs require that I remain vigilant to keep
> them living outside my home. This has involved a lot of care
> around making sure that doors fit (and close) tight and that any
> wall-penetrations (dryer vent, etc) be well managed/screened, etc.
>
> Virtually *every* Fall I recognize that one or more mice have
> taken up residence in some nook or cranny inside my house...
> evidenced primarily by foodstuffs nibbled on my counter and of
> course "droppings". Sometimes the sight or sound of scurrying.
> If I trap these invaders quickly enough I don't have a whole
> family (or several) and even worse, multiple generations take up
> residence. I've been a vegetarian most of my life but I still
> would stoop to kill-traps to stop this business right away. When
> Mary moved here (5 years ago now) her (yet) softer heart lead me
> to buy a decent no-kill trap which was limited to a single-catch
> per night nominally. It still worked. Equally important for me
> has been to have a live mousing-cat in the house... even though
> I've never had one catch/kill more than one or two in a season, I
> think the presence and threat helps to reduce the number of mice
> willing to force their way in when the opportunity is found... I
> don't know if any voluntarily move back out once they realize what
> they are facing.
>
> Last winter I finally buttoned up a sunroom I'd had 90% finished
> for years... this included replacing the raw adobe floor with a
> clay-plaster finish, sealed with walnut/citrus oil. The adobe
> floor (and cement bancos, etc) could absorb/hide a lot of
> mouse-droppings/activity that the new surfaces patently just
> enhanced... so the flux of mice in my sunroom was mostly
> ignorable/tolerable or in any case too hard to try to eliminate.
> With the new finish it was just the opposite, and thoughtlessly,
> the walnut-oil surface in the process of (many months long) curing
> fully was a terrible attractive nuisance. I think the little
> buggers thought it was a buffet laid just for them. We had
> evidence of quite a few mice living in there and even when we were
> catching and expelling one per night, there was a never ending
> supply. There were nominally *no* holes for them to get in, but
> if you've seen my construction techniques you might not be
> surprised to find that I actually *did* have a few *hidden* weak
> spots where they might have entered. Our 20 year old cat had
> gone blind the Fall before (quite gracefully) and finally passed
> away on her own that winter... so no more mouser or even the whiff
> of a threat of a mouser in the house.
>
> We then went away for 2 months with several different
> house-sitters in the house who had not instruction nor reason to
> try to keep up with the mouse flux. Besides, I was used to
> mouse-infestation being entirely a winter-time phenomena. When
> we returned mid-summer I sat in the living room with the final
> house-sitter who was scheduled to leave the next day and I
> sequentially set, caught/released 6 mice in the space of a couple
> of hours. The trap was just outside the room we were sitting in
> and I could see the little buggers playing chase on the floors,
> bancos, furniture as well as dancing over the top of the trap and
> teasing their way in and out of the trap before finally springing
> it. I went on to catch several each evening (at twilight and
> beyond) until we were down to rarely seeing more than two chasing
> through the room... and catching one per night. Hole after
> potential hole was plugged during this time. And yet they keep
> coming. There is a chance these are recycling, we haven't gone
> to the effort of notching their ears or painting their tails or
> anything. My experience in this environment is that there will
> always be dozens (hundreds) of field mice aspiring to become
> house-mice... so killing (or hauling far away) the ones we catch
> probably doesn't change that much. I now wish I hadn't moved the
> three bullsnakes I caught eating eggs in our chicken coop across
> the rio grande, but invited them to live in the sunroom... I think
> they are better (yet) mousers than a cat.
>
> We now have a fresh mouser who doesn't have continuous free access
> to the sunroom (lest the buggers re-invade the house proper) but
> who does spend time out there stalking the hell out of every nook
> and cranny... she hasn't caught any yet (though she did help catch
> a few who had gotten into the house before we could trap them).
>
> My best recommendation is to eliminate any
> food-attractive-nuisances (refrigerator, cupboard, animal-tight
> containers, etc), make sure you have no known extgerior
> wall-penetrations (even the tiniest cracks they seem to squeeze
> through) and then go on a trapping frenzy... clean up any trace
> of mice ASAP so that you *know* if you have any left as you trap
> them down to near zero. And I recommend a housecat (or two),
> though I know some do not like keeping cats. Maybe a ferret or a
> schnauzer? My best ever Gopher-Getter was a weimerainer who would
> sit for hours at the entrance to a gopher burrow just to grab
> one... if allowed, she might have cleaned them entirely out of the
> yard. We limited her time OCDing out in front of gopher holes...
> it was hard to watch.
>
> Or maybe a bullsnake (or one of many other rodent-eating varieties)?
>
> On 1/3/23 11:52 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
>> Yeah, I buy traps from Amazon a couple dozen at a time.
>>
>> =======================
>> Tom Johnson
>> Inst. for Analytic Journalism
>> Santa Fe, New Mexico
>> 505-577-6482
>> =======================
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 2, 2023, 10:45 AM Gillian Densmore
>> <gil.densmore at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Another surge of mice Q: For all of Dismember i've had
>> nothing but an ongoing trickle of mice. what the is going on
>> here? Is anyone else having mice issues as well?
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