I have had the privilege of spending some great time with my mom over the past few weeks as she recovers from her hip replacement surgery. I have been staying in her apartment and have managed to get a few things straightened up and cleaned out for her while she is in rehab so that it is not so overwhelming when she comes back home.
I alluded to the fact that there was a four legged visitor of the rodent variety in a post last week but that it was gone. Well guess what? It wasn’t.
I was sitting on the couch talking to my best friend Ann the other night when it streaked across the floor in front of me to corner where the heating and AC unit is. YIKES! I thought he was gone. Obviously the one that was caught in the stairwell was a close relative.
As I looked further I found that maintenance had placed traps around the apartment sometime during the day while I was with my mom. I had told them at the main desk about the mouse so I guess they made it to the 4th floor with some nice new traps while I was with my mom.
So I weighed my options.
Do I try to catch this little booger on my own or let the traps do their work?
I tried to get him in a pitcher but he was having nothing to do with that so I gave up and went to bed.
But I took precautions. 
I know you are riveted to this compelling story of “Catch A Mouse” so i don’t want to disappoint you. When I crept out of my room the next morning I found this.
Trap 1 Mouse 0
I must admit I was thrilled to know that one mouse was no longer going to have fun of my mom’s apartment.
My brother Mark is a wildlife biologist so I had been texted him asking his advice on the mousecapade. He is a manly man and not afraid of these little rodents. If truth be told he might actually have loved them at times as I remember he caught them to feed various animals that he kept when we were growing up. It was not uncommon to have a bread sack full of mice in our freezer and yes–there was the time my mom set some out to thaw thinking they were meatballs…..
But I digress. At one place he lived and worked in Oregon years ago he had an infestation of mice in outbuildings. It was really overrun with mice and he set out to do something about it. He told me that he bought a “buttload of traps” and set out 15-20 in a close configuration in 4 or 5 places each night. He was quite successful as you can see from the picture. 
Check out that guy at the top of picture who had the misfortune to get caught in two traps.
In the morning he would take them and toss the corpses out and had a few ravens that hung around specifically for the mouse caracas feast that was about to occur.
While I felt slightly sad that I was part of killing a mouse he assured me that they were probably Mus musculus which is a European mouse and not even native. That made me feel better.
I am winding my way homeward to North Carolina today leaving my mom in the hands of the professionals. I have been blessed to have had this time with her and know that any remaining time she has in rehab will fly by. We have had some good times and her apartment is less one mouse which is how she would like to return to it.
22 Comments
Leave a commentWhen we lived in the country, Kurt and I became quite skilled in catching them with empty oatmeal containers!!! I couldn’t use the traps you showed b/c the mice didn’t immediately expire and so cried. Yikes!!!
I heard no crying….thank goodness!!!
I’ll be watching for this episode of To Catch a Mouse on ID Discovery!
It would involve seeing me on a couch staring at it and waiting for the trap to snap!
Somehow I sense you are disturbingly gleeful about all these dead mice! 🙂
Haha! Maybe a little bit.
I could barely get through this post and those images of the dead mice. I detest mice. I mean really detest them. So glad you caught the one in your mom’s apartment.
Safe travels.
I am sorry that I stressed everyone out with this post! 🙂 I think we have the mouse issue under control now, thank goodness.
OMG this post is going to give me nightmares. I don’t like the little devils but I want them to die out of sight. Trapping them makes me really uncomfortable. I don’t like to kill anything but when I do I don’t want to see its remains. And there is never just one mouse in the house. I know more about mice than anyone person should. And I am probably one of the few married couples who pillow talk with her husband went something like this, “Honey, I am going to call Orkin tomorrow and have them come out, it’s time.” (Joe) Will they trap the mice or poison them? (Me) I want them to poison them so they die out of sight. (Joe) Good I would rather be poisoned than trapped. (Kb) Good to know, good to know.
I am so sorry I gave you nightmares! I don’t like to trap them either but I could not have my mom go home to a mouse in there. It definitely would freak her out. Without a doubt.
I am very brave about mice as long as I don’t see them…growing up in an old farm house – the occasional field mouse would find its way into the house. However, if they are seen – I definitely scream like a girl and look for something to stand on. I am glad that you survived the night and that the mouse did not! Safe travels and prayers for your Mom’s continued healing.
Thanks, Lisa! I don’t mind mice but I am just not happy when they are in the house. They have a whole big world out there that they can roam around in and I hope that they just stay there.
The picture of all of the mice was slightly disturbing! I do feel bad for that poor guy that suffered the fate of two traps. Hope the mice 🐭 got the message and will leave your mom’s place alone!
I think I gave everyone nightmares with this picture! I hope they are all gone as well!
We once lived in an apartment with a mouse infestation… We never could trap or poison them all. Eventually, weirdly enough, we just kind of got used to it. Finding little holes and the occasional dead mouse in our cupboards. I don’t miss that at all.
Ugh. That would totally gross me out but hey–I guess they have to have a place to live as well, right?
Mice make a mess and the mess wouldn’t be good for your Mother to have to clean up. Good you caught one and I hope that is the only one in the apartment. Blessings to your mother and to you for caring for her. It must have meant a lot to her to have you with her.
Thanks so much, Judy. I am so blessed to be able to be mobile and flexible enough to go when and where needed. Plus I have a husband who says “go–do what you need to do” when I feel pulled in another direction. I left several traps so hopefully any relatives will be deterred from moving in!
Hi Beth Ann I thought of you today when I saw this use for coke – Put Coca-Cola in a bowl and set it out where you have mice. The mice love Coke, drink it, and unable to expel the gas, die. Even though you aren’t at your Mum’s any longer, perhaps someone there could do this for her.
I’ve gotta correct a couple of items; I’m the referenced brother, and it is just in my OCD nature to get the facts straight (I’m not a fan of “alternate facts”…). I’m flattered that Beth thinks I am a “manly man,” that really isn’t true. The mouse “massacre” was actually not in Oregon, it was in northern Arizona, where I lived on a remote ranch, totally off the grid. And, the mice in the freezer were actually least shrews (Cryptotis parva), and Mother thought they were “Hershey Kisses,” not meatballs. She thawed them out to make snickerdoodles, and was pretty alarmed when she dug into the bag I’d frozen them in. I think she was less disturbed about that, than the time I boiled out a rotten fox skull, on the kitchen stove. And finally, I wasn’t feeding the shrews to anything, I was saving them to stuff as museum specimens for my alma mater, Ohio Northern University…
Oh geez— my memory is so bad!!!! Thanks for the true facts!!!!
I’ve set spring traps or glue traps in a hollow square around a piece of fresh bread, when mice had learned to avoid the traps themselves. But I will say that although all kinds of mice are attracted to an old wooden house in an orchard in winter, during the reigns of our *best* Queen Cats, the Cat Sanctuary has been 99% mouse-free. The years Magic and Graybelle each spent cleaning out the orchard hardly counted…mice did sometimes squeak past Minnie, Polly, and Grayzel, but not Magic, not Mogwai, and not Heather. Even moles, voles, and shrews…the cats don’t eat them, but after the cats catch them, the possums eat them.
Snakes aren’t the most efficient predators on mice; I’m sure Gulegi helps keep them down but I think of him mainly as what keeps the orchard free from venomous snakes.
But if I’d bonded with cats who no longer hunted mice, I think I’d try trapping them alive for the local nature park. They have a lot of resident wounded birds and tame snakes whose natural food is mice.