Okay, so three nights ago I'm tossing something in the trash just before dinner and I glimpse a lithe little brown shape reflected weirdly in a glass on my counter, ducking behind a small potted orchid I have there. "Was that what I think it was?" I thought to myself. A moment later, it sticks it's little head out and scampers along the back of my sink - I'm calling my husband by now - around the just-washed dishes, right over the peeled carrots and sliced cucumber and sweet red pepper I was preparing for dinner - I grabbed the salad bowl from out of its path -around the spice carousel, behind the knife block - I grabbed the frying pan with the steaks cooking on the stove - and into the unlit back burner of the gas stove.

Yikes.

So we eat dinner and I'm freaking out because there's a mouse behind my stove. After dinner I clean up while DH goes to buy traps. By the time he gets back, I've cleared everything off the counter and bleached them.

He sets the traps with peanut butter and I've washed the dishes and have set some of them out on a clean towel to dry, including the frying pan, which is inverted and leaning over the salad bowls. I leave the dishes there and we retire to the living room to watch TV and head off to bed, confident that the humane traps will do their job and there will be a new furry resident of the back flower bed in the morning.

So next day I wake up and go into the kitchen to see what trap was sprung...nada. They haven't moved. I go to put the dried dishes away and find a nasty little surprise. The mouse has dragged the seed hull from the sweet red pepper, which I'd left out on the other side of the sink to dry out for planting, and dragged it around the sink and over onto the drying towel under the frying pan where he has chewed it clean, leaving the seed husks in a neat little pile, alongside a little pile of several mouse poops.

I couldn't believe it.

DH went to buy more traps while I bleached the dishes and the counters and threw away the towel.

He comes back with these poison mousenip chew sticks that are supposed to be effective in 3-5 days. We place them behind the knife block, behind the blender, and one either side of the sink tucked up in the window well, and then another over behind the orchid.

We leave for work at 7:15 and Tuesdays are my long days, so I don't get home until 6:30. The mouse, I find out, has carried one of the poison sticks over to the stove and tried to get it down the too-narrow hole where the gas ring comes up. The stick had been chewed. We left it there, figuring the mouse would come back for more.

We took dinner into the living room to watch TV while we ate and while we're in the other room, this little mouse comes out and gets the other chew stick from behind the knife block and carries it out into the middle of the counter!

There were little blue crumblies all around it. We moved it back behind the knife block and marveled at the brazenness of this little mouse.

Since then I've come into the kitchen to find the chewie moved out to the middle of the counter several more times, and then over to the hole where the gas ring comes up from inside the stove. There were two little chewsticks there as of this morning.

I stayed home from work today (I was in a minor car accident on Tuesday morning and was feeling stiff and sore today) and I was in and out of the kitchen all day, in broad daylight and everything, and this mouse has pulled the third chewstick over toward the counter with the knifeblock, toward the stove.

It is strong for a mouse, and I think it has a cloaking device.



Assuming Super Mouse survives the poison sticks - it seems to be more like mouse vitamins to me - anyone have any suggestions? The humane D-Con peanut butter traps didn't work at all for this mouse.

Roxy - okay with mice in the garden, but not in the kitchen