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.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[SustainableAg]

That is brilliant! I'll have to make one. We found that our mice accessed the ceiling via a faux wall between the kitchen and family room, where there was once a sliding door. Too small to fit a trap into. But there is evidence they have entered in the house from the crawl space in the basement. Might be worth a giving this trap a shot!

 

[sumi]

Anything's better than heart attacks @ midnight lol

Mine are getting in via the boiler (heating) and access the rooms via the heating pipes again. The walls seem to be fairly hollow, so mouse heaven here. We had an epidemic last year and I must've killed about 20 of them before they were gone.

 

[tortoise]

I've no idea where our mice are coming in. We get them in the old part of the house that was built 1880's.

 

[Hinotori]

Mice are real issues in older homes. Mine was built in 1900. I'm not even sure how they get in ours. There is some hole under the sink cupboard in an area I can't access without tearing half the kitchen out. I can hear them under there and it drives me nuts.

Ones that get in elsewhere the dog or cats kill.