There's a mouse in my kitchen, and it's mocking me.

[channlluv]

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

[KnottedYet]

Had one of these supermice.

Put a killer snap-trap baited with peanut butter into an empty kleenex box with a hole cut into it, facing into his/her favorite gap along my floorboards. Heard a SNAP during the night. Dumped kleenex box into the garbage without ever looking into it.

No more problem.

[channlluv]

Thanks, Knot. I like not having to look in the box after the fact.

Roxy

[Maxxxie]

I've had many fun times killing mice. My most successful method has been hand-to-paw combat.

If you want to read some of my Tales Of Mickey, feel free to click this link and this link. Be warned: They both contain a significant amount of cursing, and the first post of the first link (there's more than one Tale of Mickey in the first link) contains significant overuse of the C word. I apologise. Try to look past it, if you can. Aside from my hilarious Tales of Mickey, there are some useful suggestions from other members about how to get rid of mice.

Hope this helps.
Max

[Pedal Wench]

If you want to read some of my Tales Of Mickey, feel free to click this link and this link.

Maxxie - that's just hilarious! You must write for a living - you're incredible! What a page-turner!!! Really - if you haven't written a book, you should start. Now!

[channlluv]

Those were pretty funny stories.

And the house next door to me is renovating, but nobody there was hoarding. They just had 8 people living in a house built for 3. (Three licenses drivers, six cars...go figure...and two of them were big, big truck things. They're all gone now.)

Roxy

[Cataboo]

The previous tenant to my apartment in grad school had had a dog and just left out dog food all day.

In the first 2 weeks, I killed 10 mice. And usually would kill one or two a month, so I just left traps set constantly.

You really want the hair trigger old style traps, not those fancy ones with the fake looking cheese.

For the especially devious mice, I'd line up 3-4 traps baited with peanut butter against the wall in the corner... so bait towards wall, mouse could possibly get the peanut butter off the outside one without triggering it, but it couldn't get to the peanut butter on the inner traps without triggering one of them...

all organic food matter or whatever was kept in plastic containers or in the fridge... even if it didn't need to be refrigerated.. dirty dishes if I didn't wash them immediately got shoved in the fridge, too. (that was especially after my landlord gave me 2 species of roaches in a used applicance one summer) So only source of food was the peanut butter traps.

[Selkie]

When we had some mice a couple years ago, we got some electronic traps. Put the bait inside the box and activate it. When the mouse goes inside---ZAP, goes to mouse heaven. The best thing is that there is an indicator light so you know when you got one. Then you can have DH dispose of the body (the traps are reusable and battery powered).

[OakLeaf]

We live in the country, and mice are just a (disgusting) fact of life.

Rule #1 is, while we're not the world's greatest housekeepers, when there's a mouse in the house, it goes into high gear. If I have to leave something out to dry, like your pepper, it goes into a colander with a lid on it. Kitchen gets vacuumed of crumbs after dinner every night. All food containers are kept tightly closed - although in general, a casual intruder won't chew through cardboard or plastic unless we're away from home for a while. They don't have to eat a lot, mostly they've come into the house looking for shelter not food, so if there's anything to eat besides the bait, they'll choose that.

Rule #2 is they have patterns where they like to go. They're not as rigid as ants or deer, but they have patterns. Place traps all over the house, but if you've caught one mouse somewhere, pay most attention to traps in the same area for the next one. Remember again that they're probably looking for shelter, not so much for food, so the kitchen may not be the best place to trap them. At least 90% of the mice I trap are in the basement in front of the dryer. I think they're more likely to investigate a trap when they feel secure generally.

Rule #3 is that they need water. Sponge out the bottom of any sinks that don't drain completely, and place a trap near your dehumidifier drain if you have one.

Rule #4 is if you're a bleeding heart like me, once you trap a live mouse, take it at least a mile and a half from your house or it will come back.


Peanut butter is usually good bait, but it needs to be something they can smell, so I'm guessing non-stabilized PB is probably better. I don't buy the other kind so I don't know for sure. Often they will go for ketchup. Or the cartoon stand-by, a small morsel of the stinkiest cheese you have.

I'd avoid poisoning mice in the house even if I didn't mind killing them, for the simple reason that they will go into the walls to die, and if you've never had this happen, you don't want to experience the odor. You know what road kill smells like after a few days, imagine it in your kitchen. It will linger for 2-3 weeks and return whenever the humidity is high. If you want to use poison, keep it in out-buildings and back alleys (in specifically designed containers so kids and pets can't get in).

Mice Cubes are the traps I've used for years. They used to be available at retail everywhere, but the stores figured out that something this cheap, effective and reusable wasn't making them any profit . If you're handy, it would be easy enough to make one. It's just a polycarbonate box with a door that swings in from a hinge at the top. The door is slightly longer than the opening, so it will only swing in one direction, and once the mouse is in, it can't get out. There are a few air holes in the door so the mice can smell the bait, although I usually smear a tiny bit of PB outside the door. They can't steal bait from this trap - they have to actually go inside to get it. In 10 years we've had one big chunky mouse that figured out how to get out of this trap - by bouncing around so much that it eventually turned the trap upside down and the door could swing in. We put a brick on top of the trap and caught it the next night. <evil g> Other than that, it's impossible to defeat this trap.


Good luck, they can be really frustrating.

ETA: hehehe Maxx

[bmccasland]

Get a cat?

[Biciclista]

Get a cat?

yeah, that is what i was going to say. Feeding poison takes a few days. And then you have a body to first find and then dispose of.

I'm sure the poison you fed the mouse will take effect, but be warned that it will not die on YOUR schedule.

I've lived in the city and in the country (in the middle of a hayfield in Idaho for a few years) and have never had rodents in my house, well, except for the ones that the cats brought in! I cannot attribute it to my fastidious house cleaning, because we're careless and even sloppy. It is the cats!
When i was a kid we had a mouser who was so good that we'd take him to other people's houses to catch mice.

Good luck btw.

[Cataboo]

Oh. Don't ever use glue traps.

Becuase there's the problem that they flop all over the place to try to get free and somehow work themselves under bookcases and you're wandering around looking for a mouse on a glue trap, and then cause ... you have to get them off somehow and do something with them.

[DebW]

I just figure I can live with a few mice. Since I'm not fastidiously clean and may leave dirty dishes out over night, the mice have food and I deal with them. When they get brazen enough to run around in broad daylight, then I do a better job of cleaning and storing food. Luckily, no sign of mice yet in my new apartment.

[OakLeaf]

Trouble with "living with them" is that they're there for shelter, and they will go everywhere.

They don't distinguish between your good, expensive clothes, your irreplaceable souvenir T-shirts, or the painting clothes that they're welcome to, when they decide to shred things for their nests.

I'm not squeamish, but when I find droppings in my silverware drawer, I'm going to wash the whole lot, and doing it every day gets old (and wasteful).

And the one time when one ran across my face while I was sleeping really freaked me out.

Thankfully, I don't live in an area where hantavirus is prevalent. But in some areas of the US, mouse infestations can be deadly to humans. I've known people (granted, in a depressed rural area) for whom it was more economical to burn their house down than to try to sanitize it.

If anyone has figured out how to keep them from eating the wiring in your car/motorcycle (which sometimes just means a couple of hours soldering, and sometimes - especially on the Prius - means a tow and $500 at the dealership)...

[Kalidurga]

Get a cat?

Don't get a cat unless you enjoy picking up pieces of dismembered &/or regurgitated mouse.


And I'll second the veto on glue traps. You can hear the mouse flopping around until it dies and the glue ends up stuck on anything that's nearby.

My mouse problem from several years ago didn't end until I sealed up the hole behind my stove and the condo HOA replaced a bunch of the siding on the building. You can try any sort of trap imaginable, but the only sure thing is to seal up their entryway.