Posts Tagged ‘mouse problem’
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.
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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.
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Relative Something 