Posts Tagged ‘mice’
Finishing Touch
Before the monsoon rains began pouring down on us yesterday, I hustled down to finish raking the path where I had done the trimming on Tuesday. I took a couple of before-and-after photos…
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Late last year, I came up with a plan to leave the cuttings lying beneath the fence wires to smother or stunt future growth there. This will be a second chance to test my idea. The first try wasn’t very conclusive, so I’m hoping this will give me a bigger sample size from which to judge the ultimate effectiveness.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The green grasses and a multitude of other random plant life common in our region are pretty persistent about sprouting anywhere and everywhere, whether welcomed or not. It would be a sweet victory if simply leaving a mat of cuttings proved successful in keeping our fences from repeatedly getting swallowed by tall growth.
While yesterday’s rain was pouring down, I busied myself with woodworking projects beneath the roof over the shop entrance. When I finished and was closing the door after putting everything away, I found a milk snake slithering along the rocks of the lower portion of the wall. It stopped when it noticed me, putting us at a standoff.
I closed the door, hoping it wasn’t planning on going inside to get out of the minor flooding going on around the building. Then the snake began poking its head into the mortar between the rocks, as if it was looking for an opening. Apparently, it had overshot its door, because when it folded around to poke farther back along its body, it found a tiny hole I couldn’t see and swiftly disappeared inside.
I immediately opened the door to see if it had just slithered right into the shop, which had me thinking I was never going to work in there ever again. I didn’t see any sign of the snake, so I guess it lives in the walls.
That wasn’t the least bit comforting. I can only hope it is controlling the mouse population most likely responsible for making those little holes that provided access to the structure in the first place.
I love the outdoors and wildlife, but I really wish I didn’t have to share space with mice and snakes.
I’d consider plugging that hole I saw the snake slide through if I didn’t believe it would force the snake to eventually come out of the wall into the shop.
I am not a fan of snakes. Not even a little bit.
.
.
Thistle Seeds
We are at the lake! After an uneventful drive (other than the fabulous cheeseburger and fries on the road from the Lake Magnor Restaurant in Clayton) we arrived just before sunset and (oh, we also stopped in Hayward to pick up a pizza from Coop’s and some essentials from the grocery store [did someone say “ice cream?”]) we set about the routines of arrival.
“Do you have the key?” Check.
“Turn on the water.” Done.
“Can you start a fire in the fireplace?” Of course!
“I’m going to turn on the end of the football game.” Sure!
“Do you want to sleep in the loft or in Mom’s room?” Either’s fine with me.
“What the heck is in this drawer!?” Uh oh.
There was too much for it to be mouse turds. Was there a bag of wild rice up in the loft? No, that’s birdseed. Thistle, to be precise. We checked the pantry where birdseed would likely have been stored. Sure enough.
How could such a little hole lead to such a big spill?
This had to be a couple of lifetimes’ supply for the mice. I wonder how many trips up to the loft it took for the amount of seeds Cyndie found stashed up there. Being a wily sleuth, Cyndie checked a kitchen drawer that has had mouse droppings in the past.
Oh, yeah. About four-fifths thistle to one-fifth turds.
I found some old-style mouse traps in the basement mud room, and we baited them with thistle stuck on peanut butter after some intense sweeping, vacuuming, and scrubbing.
After pizza and some ice cream (not necessarily in that order) and the movie, “Conclave,” we were ready to turn in for the night. I climbed in the crisp, cool sheets and Cyndie went to get another blanket. She came back with the quilt sewed by Hays seamstresses many years ago up here when we brought my family for a Wildwood getaway.
Then she spotted mouse turds. Uh oh, again. Did they come from the quilt? She gently carried it out to inspect over a tile floor. I climbed out of the sheets and found more turds. Moving the pillows, it was obvious they hadn’t come from the quilt.
“How many mice have been sleeping in this bed?!”
Sheets were stripped and the bed was remade. I presented the option of sleeping in the loft, but we’d already settled in, and the bed would need to be remade anyway, so we soldiered on.
Cyndie eventually checked every other bed in the house, and the one we picked was the only one that had been messed up.
I checked traps this morning, and they hadn’t been touched. Birdseed is all moved to the garage and stowed in metal canisters. A load of garbage has already been dumped. Here’s hoping that’s the last of the stashes of thistle seeds.
The temperature outside right now is 2°F, and the wind chill is below zero. Only the edge of the lake has started to freeze, and the open water is steaming up thick clouds over the surface.
We are definitely up at the lake.
.
.
Mice Everywhere
Today is Cyndie’s and my 42nd wedding anniversary and our son, Julian’s 35th birthday. Other than that, it feels like a regular old Tuesday. Regular, except for the fact there are mice showing up everywhere I turn.
Sunday night I was doing dishes when a mouse walked out from beneath the stove, traveled along the baseboard and disappeared beneath the refrigerator. I put a trap along that path and it hasn’t been touched since.
Over the weekend, Cyndie called for my assistance because there were two live mice in the wash tub in the laundry room.
Yesterday, while I was eating lunch at the center island of our kitchen, I glanced over to my right and spotted a mouse walking from the dining room rug into the sunroom. Cyndie swatted and disposed of it before Asher figured out what all the fuss was about.
Obviously, our house is not sealed tight against rodent intrusion or maybe the snakes just stopped eating mice and there’s been a population explosion.
I couldn’t get away from dealing with mice when I went out to the shop to work on setting up a new water tank we bought. I needed to connect wiring for a 12V auxiliary plug on the Grizzly ATV. There had been a mouse nest under the seat long ago and back then, I disconnected wires where the insulation had been chewed. Now I needed to patch them up and reconnect them.
There was still leftover debris in the compartment under the seat so I pulled out the shop vac and turned it on. Chewed-up bits of fiberglass insulation shot out of the exhaust port of the vacuum and blew over everything in the vicinity. Somehow, an industrious mouse made its way up into the guts of the shop vac and built quite a nest.
There is probably very little insulation left in one of the walls of the shop.
Maybe for our anniversary, we could buy each other the services of a pest control company. True love.
Happy Birthday, Julian!!
.
.
Obvious Evidence
Based on all the mice caught in our traps throughout the winter, it should come as no surprise that they navigate the harsh elements as well as long-legged wildlife, but I am always intrigued by the obvious evidence rodents are burrowing beneath the snow.
Despite the frigid overnight temperatures greeting me bitterly at each morning feeding the last few days, it appears one little critter was busy making tracks.
There is also obvious evidence of the increasing angle of sunshine and its growing influence by way of melting that is occurring despite the chilly air temperatures. That will prove to be a benefit when it comes to the threat of spring flooding. There is a deeper snowpack now than we’ve had in many years and if it were to melt all at once, flooding would likely occur.
There is an additional aspect that could dramatically influence whether we have any troublesome flooding this spring or not and that is the amount of rain that will fall in spring storms. Based on a recent video released by our county’s historical society, flooding from heavy rain can happen at any time of year. In 1942 there was a flooding rain that happened in September.
.
.
When I saw this video the first time, I realized I would quickly blame the extent of warming of our planet if this kind of flooding rain happened today. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen rain of the intensity described by Dr. James Vedder happen in the fall. But it did happen back in 1942.
Flooding rain fell in July of 1879 and washed away a mill and flooded my great-great-grandfather’s house a little over ten miles south of where we live now.
To me, this is obvious evidence that the steep ravines and many rivers of the “driftless region,” of which our county is included, are susceptible to flooding from heavy rain.
I wonder how many mice survive that kind of extreme weather.
.
.
Day One
‘Twas the first day of the new year and all through the house
the possibilities are endless like the droppings from that dang mouse.
The blessings we are able to enjoy tend to feel somewhat diminished by the harsh realities being suffered by people around the world who live in war zones or are enduring other oppressions. Mice in our house seem like such a minor hassle in comparison.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The morning frost highlighted horse hair snagged on the overhang support beam that gets used as a scratching post. It also made our evergreen trees look like the flocked white Christmas trees that I always thought were ridiculous when I was a kid. In my limited knowledge, trees weren’t white. Why would they make them that way?
Plenty of life lessons available in that example of limited perspective.
The weather service has put us under a winter storm watch for Tuesday. The first new snow of the year! The old snow we already have is starting to show its age.
The squirrels out our windows are going gangbusters after the acorns under the snowpack.
Sure wish there was a way to harness their energy and put it to good use. I wonder if they could be trained to ward off the mice that get into our house.
Happy New Year 2023!
Mouse House
If you have ever heard anyone who owns a log home say their place is sealed tight against rodent intrusion, feel free to question their grip on reality. We could crawl around our foundation day and night, scale the walls to inspect every inch around the soffits, and climb to the peak of our stone chimney and still, I wouldn’t think we’d identified every teeny space of potential access.
We are well into the season of incoming mice and Pequenita is only doing her bare minimum to fatally “play” with the surprise toys. The other night it was hour after hour of romping around our bedroom floor, talking to her latest playmate while Cyndie and I feigned solid sleep in maximum avoidance mode. I was just sleepily aware enough in the morning to only step partway onto the cold, dead remains before catching myself and stopping.
Two nights ago, just after lights out in the bedroom, some busy rodent started making its presence known with repetitive scratching/chewing in the attic space above our ceiling.
Last night, as Cyndie was working on her laptop at the dining room table, something fell from one of the log beams in the ceiling by the front sunroom. It was a mouse.
From my position in the bathroom shower at the time, I heard muffled stomping and banging that instantly had me wondering what in the heck could be going on out there. Then, the sound of Cyndie saying something affectionate to Delilah. I assumed they were engaged in an energized activity to drain some dog energy before the end of the day.
Soon after, Cyndie pops in to announce, “I have a story for you.”
She grabbed a fly swatter and garbage bin that were right there and tried to capture the mouse. Delilah noticed what was going on and jumped up to help. It was Delilah who caught the mouse. Then, our canine carnivore wasted no time in consuming her prize before Cyndie had even a second to decide what to do about it.
I think that was the moment I heard Cyndie offering the dog a kind word.
After my shower, I came into the bedroom to find our cat contentedly curled up on the dog bed, clueless about being one-upped by the dog in the mouse control department.
Cyndie has contacted our pest control service again. “No, it’s not another woodchuck. Nope, not a nest of bees in the ground. Uh uh, not raccoons again. Not bats. Not this time, anyway. Now it’s just a plain old mouse problem.”
They won’t need directions to our house.
Is there such a thing as kevlar shrink wrap? If it came in a wood grain pattern, that would be cool. Just cover our whole house like the blue stuff they stretch over boats to winterize them.
You’d think the multiple prowling neighbor cats would do a better job of controlling the mouse population around here. Come to think of it, that could be increasing the incentive for mice to find new ways inside.
I’m sure pest control will be happy to invoice extensive time and effort to de-mouse our log house.
.
.
Big Little
Amid all the big issues swirling around the pandemic, like federal government response, different state government responses, economic doom and gloom, employment insecurities, and uncertain futures, there are still a lot of typical everyday little things that continue to play out.
I find that I keep putting off making a call to address a need to replace the windshield on my Crosstrek. For months I have ignored a chip from a rock impact that only showed up in my view when the light was hitting it just right. More recently, a second stone strike, low on the passenger side, began to form a crack. Now that crack is slowly growing evermore toward the midpoint.
Last night, we enjoyed lo mein and sesame chicken take-out from King House restaurant in Ellsworth. It tasted divine. It was almost a religious experience to open the classic white box of lo mein and dish out a generous portion of noodles and goodies onto my plate, then spoon the dangling noodles back into the box to discover it was still filled to the top. If I hadn’t just served it myself, I would have argued that it couldn’t be true.
I’m already looking forward to enjoying the leftovers in the next few days. There looks to be enough remaining to feed an army.
While we were up in the loft eating, there was a very loud bang on one of our windows. We get a lot of bird strikes against our glass portals to the forest views, but this one was loud enough that I struggled to imagine what could have made that impact. A small deer? When the dog and I finally reached the front of the sunroom, a very large bird leaped up into the air and flew to the closest giant oak tree. It was a pileated woodpecker!
Cyndie noted the feathers and a panic-induced s-shape of excrement stuck to one of the crank-out windows beside me.
Little distractions from the historical pandemic drama playing out in the agonizingly slow motion of months threatening to drag into years are a welcome diversion.
Even if they have to do with two grossly decaying mice that were discovered in the long-stored chicken waterer that Cyndie pulled out for use now that freezing temperatures appear to be behind us for another year. Apparently, they figured out a way to squeeze inside the egg-shaped plastic dome, but not how to get out again.
I’m told it didn’t smell pleasant.
I have no new news to report on the friendly feathered visiting grouse that was keeping Cyndie company on Wednesday as she worked around her garden plots. Maybe it was just passing through. Just like the woodpecker and so many of the other wild travelers who traverse our terrain.
The two worlds of big things and small things coexist, but rarely seem to show any particular concern for one another.
Gladly, we have free choice to decide which of the two will have the focus of our attention at any given moment in time.
.
.
Dramatic Improvement
Yesterday’s snowfall was a dramatic improvement over the first two plowable events we’ve experienced so far this season. Just ten days ago I posted about how yucky it was after receiving rain for a few hours before the storm changed to snow. Trying to plow that mess was a miserable experience.
I’d almost forgotten how good it is to clear dry snow. Last night the Grizzly ATV worked like magic again, plowing away the snow with ease. The snow conditions make a world of difference when it comes to clearing all our driving lanes and selected walking paths.
By the time I was done, instead of coming back into the house tired and frustrated, I was feeling a little giddy with excitement over the perfect conditions. I almost wanted to find something else to clear, but dinner proved to be a more enticing option.
In the middle of yesterday’s falling flakes, Cyndie captured a new shot of the snow slide on the hay shed. I was surprised to see how much of it was still holding together, even though the left side had started coming apart.
Cyndie and Delilah made me jealous after I heard Cyndie’s description of their coming upon an owl while they were walking one of the trails in our woods.
She wasn’t sure about it at first, as the large bird swooped away from them and settled upon a branch overhead. Cyndie guessed it might be a hawk. Then, that telltale rotation of the head gave it away as the owl twisted to look in their direction.
Delilah hadn’t followed the flight with her eyes so was oblivious when the noble hunter chose to perch above them, but Cyndie’s posturing to take the picture was enough to clue her in.
The owl must not be all that wise because Delilah’s rushing toward the tree scared it off, even though the threat was meaningless from down on the ground.
In the low light of dusk, all that showed up in the image was a dark blob up in the branches.
I don’t remember where I read that the presence of owls is an indication of a healthy forest environment, but the idea stuck with me. Many symbolisms about owl sightings align with either good fortune or a bad omen, so we could go either way with that.
I’m choosing to focus on the probability that it is our vibrant, healthy forest that attracted the owl to visit.
With luck, that predator is helping to control our mouse and mole populations.
Having fewer moles ravaging our yard spaces would be a dramatic improvement in the summer season. It always amazes me to find tracks in the snow from mice and moles when the temperatures are cold and the ground frozen solid.
Now I’ll watch for owl-wing feather streaks in the snow, too.
.
.
Wild Interlopers
Lately, for some yet-to-be-determined reason, we have been experiencing a distinct increase in uninvited wild visitors, some of whom seem interested in establishing residency. Some of them are cute and for the most part harmless, like the five young deer Cyndie spotted grazing in the back pasture last night.
Some are, unfortunately, all too familiar, like the mice and bats that Pequenita seems to view as mere house playmates for her ongoing enjoyment.
There are, as noted in two other recent posts, a family of raccoons and a suspected woodchuck making their presence known in broad daylight on separate occasions.
Yesterday morning, Cyndie sent me a picture looking out the egress window of the basement bedroom revealing a large mound of soil tossed up by one of several possible burrowing pests.
I’m leaning toward the woodchuck, based on the size of the excavation.
When I got home to see for myself, there were two frogs peering in the window from the top of the pile, and a mole napping off to the side.
My adventurous spirit is at a low ebb and I am struggling to muster any interest whatsoever in addressing even one of these wild animal pests, let alone all of them. Sadly, neglecting to deal with them now offers nothing but greater complications later. I’d rather not admit that it crossed my mind that we could simply sell the place, as is, and let the buyers deal with the pests.
Or, we could throw money at the problem and hopefully find a professional who is genuinely interested in tackling the challenges. I wonder if it would be possible to trap both a woodchuck and some raccoons at the same time?
I will happily watch the critters be driven down our driveway and off into the sunset for relocation at some magical forest that is over 25 miles away from everywhere, where all pest control companies release their captives to live out pesky lives in blissful harmony.
.
.
How’s That?
While Cyndie and I were away on Saturday afternoon, we had a new ranch helper recruit from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls stop by to care for our animals. We checked on her with a text message, and learned things were all good.
That was followed by this bizarre note:
“Also just FYI, there’s a dead mouse caught in your garage door.”
Excuse me?
She provided a visual aid.
Really.
How in the…?
Timing. It’s all in the timing.
Somehow, in the few minutes after opening the garage door, getting settled in the car, and our backing out, that mouse must have made its way onto the door. Did it drop from a rafter? Climb up from below? I have no idea.
I’m guessing that when Cyndie pushed the button on the remote to close the door, that critter’s tail dropped into the seam that opened between the door panels as they rounded the corner from horizontal to vertical. As fast as that seam opens up, it closes tight, and the mouse’s tail got pinched firmly enough that the poor thing was left helplessly hanging, head down.
Cause of death: Unknown.
At the risk of offering too much information, the body was not stiff when we finally returned home around dinner time.
We made sure to pull up close before opening the door, so we could see the spectacle for ourselves. There it was, hanging plain as day.
We opened the door using the remote and I watched to see the mouse drop when the seam opened as the door climbed the curve in the tracks. It didn’t budge.
We parked the car and I stepped outside while Cyndie took up a position at the button on the wall. I had her push the button to start closing the door until the seam opened and the mouse came into view, then shouted for her to stop it.
The mouse was stuck in place. I grabbed a stick and easily brushed the body free of the door and it fell to the ground, limp.
Who knew it was possible to trap a mouse between the panels of a garage door? Well, I do now.
I know a thing or two, because I’ve seen a thing or two, to borrow J. K. Simmons‘ current catch-phrase from a television commercial.
Just another normal day on the ranch.
.
.
Relative Something 