What goes bump in the night?

[sumi]

Important notice to mouse trap users:

It's brutal when you're a glass of wine down and half asleep and it's nearly midnight and it's under your darn bed and jerking around and banging against the skirting board while it dies and then giving you a reproachful stare with those liquid black eyes when you turn the light on and peer over the side of your bed to see what the hell the racket is all about?!?

It almost, almost made me feel bad there for a minute… O.K. maybe I did feel bad for about 2 seconds, it WAS midnight and I had some wine and I actually like mice…. just not in my house!


I hear another one in the wall right now

I killed 4 already

This was the second one I trapped around midnight

Oh, peanut butter works very well… Better than cheese.

 

[MoonShadows]

OK...Our house was built in 1840, and has more nooks and crannies for field mice to enter. We used to place traps all over the place...until this year. We made a trap that gets them in the cellar BEFORE they ever get upstairs.

Take a 5 gallon bucket. Drill two holes on either side near the top. Take an old coffee can, and drill two holes...one on top, one on bottom. Put a small pipe through the coffee can and then through either side of the 5 gallon bucket....sort of like making your own hamster cage. Fill the bucket with about 2 gallons of water. Smear the coffee can with peanut butter. Make a ramp up to the edge of the bucket with a piece of wood. The mouse will climb the ramp, jump onto the can for the PB, and the can will rotate depositing the mouse into the water. The mouse drowns. The next day you empty the bucket with the dead mouse. We have caught as many as 3 a night during this past winter. Haven't seen any mouse poop upstairs since we built this mouse trap.

I didn't want to run downstairs and take a picture. Here is a variation of this trap using a soda can I found on the internet.

 

[sumi]

I heard the trap go off around 03:00am this time. Got up and checked this morning and found no mouse in it, which was a first, these traps are quite deadly. Mystery solved when I went downstairs and found a dead mouse on the floor in the lounge/kitchen.

I really hope we're going to run out of mice soon.

 

[MoonShadows]

Caught 3 this weekend in our homemade peanut butter trap.

 

[Britesea]

They have to be fast at reproducing since nearly every predator out there will catch and eat mice. Even herbivores will stomp on them if they can. They must have the strongest hearts; they don't die of heart attacks from all the stress.

A friend of mine had a couple of cats, and once she found them both on the bed- one proudly holding a dead mouse by the tail... which still had the trap attached at the other end. The other cat was looking at the first cat with the most puzzled look on his face, lol.

 

[sumi]

 

[sumi]

And before anyone asks, I'm trapping them under my bed, because they are nesting in my bedroom and coming into the bedroom via the radiator pipe. I set traps everywhere, but this apparently is the spot.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

GRRRRRRR - I don't like 'em at all.....unless they live at least 100 yards from my house and barn. Glad you're catching some of 'em!

 

[tortoise]

We get them in our bedroom ceiling. :shudder: The ceiling is acoustic tile, so DH lifts a tile and puts a trap above. Nothing quite like hearing the trap go off just as we're falling asleep. Yuck.

 

[SustainableAg]

We have a problem with field mice, as we are renting an 1850's farm at present. We hear them in the ceiling above the living room. After catching 5 in traps, we put out rat poison, as it is the only way to get them out of the ceiling. Not the best method, but unfortunately our only option.