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<p>Gil -</p>
<p> To misquote Leonard Cohen: "There is a crack in everything, that
is how the mice get in".<br>
</p>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p> 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.<br>
</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>Or maybe a bullsnake (or one of many other rodent-eating
varieties)?<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/3/23 11:52 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CABg8s8LzOjjmHxK6_NzY2cJSVs1hiDhRpttiwQGAwK1zR_ye+A@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div dir="auto">Yeah, I buy traps from Amazon a couple dozen at a
time.<br>
<br>
<div data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=======================<br>
Tom Johnson<br>
Inst. for Analytic Journalism<br>
Santa Fe, New Mexico<br>
505-577-6482<br>
=======================</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jan 2, 2023, 10:45 AM
Gillian Densmore <<a href="mailto:gil.densmore@gmail.com"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">gil.densmore@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">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?</div>
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