Category Archives: Mice

Anything to do with mice

The Coon and the Birdbath

I don’t want to say that I’m a trespasser because I’m not, but on the rare occasion, I’ll find an old building or a mysterious house and of course, my curiosity gets the best of me and I have to go investigate. As the saying goes, “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back.” Not very many people know about the second part of that phrase, but it’s one of the phrases that directs my life. So my story starts on a hazy August afternoon, I was riding my bike down a new dirt path, when I came upon an old Victorian era style house that had fallen into disrepair. It was obvious that no one had lived there for a very long time. There were broken windows, the yard was more of a jungle, and the fence was falling apart faster than a Nature Valley granola bar. I rode up the driveway, determined to see every inch of this place I could. Starting in the front I walked up the large porch and let out a small screech as a small family of mice darted across my feet on my way to the front door. I decided instead to start in the backyard. I walked around the side of the house, admiring the tall gables, and long thin windows. When I came around the back side of the house, the first thing I noticed was an overturned birdbath. The pedestal was lying on its side, and the basin of the bird bath was overturned about half a foot away from where the stand was. I went and turned the gleaming white marble pedestal to its original position, but when I tried to lift the basin, I found it to be too heavy. I searched for a moment for something to use as a lever to turn it over. I found a large tree branch and wedged it under an edge of the basin and gave it a forceful push upwards. It seemed to have worked, but my excitement was short-lived because a large beast of gray and black fur leapt right at my throat! I screamed and ran from the raccoon that had been freed from its marble prison. I didn’t stop running until I made it to my bike, and even then I didn’t stop. Possibly haunted houses? Sure. Angry raccoons that had been trapped underneath a birdbath? NO WAY!

Related Posts

Hidden Figures

People say that when you see one mouse, there are many more in the shadows. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a mouse infestation. But in my 17 years of being a licensed animal control specialist, I can confirm that this saying is true. Many people don’t understand that mice breed rapidly, The average female can give birth to about 10 litters per year (each litter contains 6-8 babies) and now imagine that inside your home. Hundreds of little mice scampering under your floors, between your bedrooms, darting across your kitchen floor. It’s because of this reason that it is so vital to contact an exterminator or animal control specialist as soon as possible.
Mice can do all sorts of damage to your home, things you wouldn’t typically think of. Because mice live in nests, they will chew and rip up anything that could be used to build their home within your home. Anything from wood, installation, and even electrical wiring. Mice have no respect for your belongings, they will chew through furniture, appliances, walls and anything in between. Structural issues become a very real problem if a mouse infestation gets advanced enough. The material items are the least of your worries.
On top of being incredibly destructive, mice are known for carrying all sorts of diseases and germs. Sure, from a distance mice are super cute and fluffy. With their small plush bodies, and their small eyes and adorable ears. But if you look at them from a biological standpoint, they are the ultimate breeding ground for bacterial and viral infections. From rat-bite fever, to the plague, even Leptospirosis. These dangerous and even deadly diseases transfer even faster if the mice get into your food and you living areas. This is why it’s so important to contact a proper specialist so they can make sure to sanitize and clean properly. So please, keep yourself and your families safe from these hidden figures

Seeing Things

I swear to you, there are mice in my apartment.  For a month now I’ve seen them scurrying around and jumping from place to place, but no one believes me.  I called the landlord right after I saw the first one run out from under the couch and he called a company to perform and inspection – but nothing.  They found zero, zip, zilch, NO evidence of mice anywhere; so I convinced myself it was my brain playing tricks on me.  Until a week later and I watched one jump off the counter and run into the pantry and I KNOW that was not just an illusion. They’re there, but nobody believes me.

In the last two weeks, I just see them everywhere.  Constantly running across the furniture and hiding under gaps and in crevices, but no one will come out and look at the problem.  My landlord doesn’t think they’re there so he won’t call another person to do an inspection, and no one will come out without the landlord’s permission!  I don’t know what to do, there are mice in the apartment; they’re living in the mattresses and the cushions.  The problem is the only signs of them is me actually seeing them.  They haven’t tried to chew through any food in my pantry and I can’t find signs of feces anywhere, but I can smell them.

I just need someone to come help me, or at least someone to see them so I have evidence to my claim instead of everyone thinking I’m batty.  I don’t want to share my apartment with mice, I don’t want to be living with rodents, I want this taken care of!  I don’t know what I have to do to get people to believe me, but I have to do it quickly before it gets worse.  I know there are multiple living here, but its them against me and apparently my word doesn’t mean anything anymore!  I may be old but I’m not senile yet!

Cinderella’s Little Homewreckers

We’ve got a serious mouse problem in our kitchen, and no matter what we do we can’t seem to catch all of them.  It’s been happening for the last four or five months and is driving me bipity-bopity bonkers.  It started out small, where we would just see little black mouse turds here and there on the kitchen floor so we set out a couple traps to see what would happen.  We only caught one, but we figured the problem was solved, since it seemed so small in the first place, but we were wrong.  It only escalated from there.

Even though immediately following the capture of the first mouse things died down, not long after they picked up rapidly.  Before we knew it, there were piles of mouse droppings all over the kitchen and even inside the pantry and washroom.  Then after that, the mice started to chew through bags and boxes inside of the pantry, meaning in the time-span of this mouse problem, quite a bit of our food storage could have been contaminated.  I have two young children, and I won’t even risk feeding them something that could harbor sickness from these rodents.

After we first discovered them in the pantry, we bought 20 more traps and set them up all over the house (but mostly in the kitchen).  We’ve caught 12 mice now, but are still seeing signs of activity.  At this point, this mouse problem is the biggest stressor in my life and so this is my cry for help.  I know my husband wants to fight this battle himself, but I can’t deal with it anymore, I’m calling in the special ops!  Professionals are coming in tomorrow and bringing the arsenal with them, it’s still possible for me to live happily ever after – mouse free!

Living with a Litterbug

I’ve got a major mouse problem, it’s not an Australia in the summer kind of major, but for a small 3 bedroom townhouse – it’s major. I have never had a problem with mice before, I mean yeah one here and there over my entire lifetime, but never 5 in one week. I’m trying to get rid of them on my own but every time I set a trap I catch a new one, and then when I turn around another is running across the floor into the wall. I think my house might be infested and I can’t deal with that alone! I need help from someone who knows what they’re doing and doesn’t cry every time they have to pick them up. I’m a vegetarian, so killing animals is not my thing, but I have to do what I have to do I guess.
I wish I could say that I had no clue why this was happening, but I know EXACTLY who to blame for this disaster that I’m currently living in. I’m a junior in college and I rent this townhouse with two other girls – actually, it’s currently just one other girl. The girl that USED to sleep in the room next to mine was evicted two weeks ago because she was practically a hoarder and was destroying the room. The owners told me and my roommate that if we’d be willing to clean up what she left behind and get the room back in order, we could have a month or two rent free – depending on the size of the mess. Well, guess where we found the mouse problem. DING DING DING! There are four holes in the walls in the room, and that’s where we are catching every single mouse.
So far, we haven’t seen any outside of the one bedroom, but with the crazy amount that we’ve been catching, I’m afraid our mouse problem is getting out of hand. Everyone is collectively trying to get rid of these things and looking for help. I’m not going to lie, having someone else kill the mice for me isn’t my only motive in looking for a professional (though it is a big one). I’m also hoping that maybe, I can get another month off of rent if I can solve this problem for good. And I mean, obviously I can’t keep living in a house with a mouse infestation, so I’m hoping that they’ll clear out so I can keep living here. Finding good housing in college is hard enough.

The Longest Night

Around this time last year, we had rats in the walls.  I look back on the whole situation and I’m kind of surprised that I didn’t realize it beforehand.  I would find little black pellets both inside my house and on the deck near some gaps in the siding.  Obviously I’m not completely oblivious, I recognized the pellets and feces and assumed it was a small mouse problem so I set out some mouse traps here and there, but never had any success so I assumed the feces I had found was old and that my cat had already killed the culprits.

That was until one night I was enjoying old NCIS reruns, and my TV stopped working.  I tried turning it off and on, and plugging and unplugging it but still nothing; no sound, no static, no anything.  I wasn’t exactly sure what to do so I Googled possible problems.  I came up with a blown fuse, faulty cord or plug, or even a failed power supply; I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with that information so I called my neighbor and asked if he’d come take a look.  He came and checked everything he could and said he wasn’t sure why it wouldn’t work, everything seemed perfectly fine and nothing else was down.  I had to wait out the night in radio silence until the cable company could come in the morning.

When they did, I was genuinely surprised at what they had found!  It wasn’t a problem with any of the actual electrical sources, but something had chewed through the cable in the wall that fed to the back of the TV.  After that I called in a Wildlife Technician and they were able to identify my problem: there were rats in the walls.  It took a month or so to get them all trapped and all of the mess they left behind cleaned up, but I was very happy with the outcome.  Now I can sit and watch my shows without any worry of rats chewing up my wires.

Like Moths to a Flame

I don’t know what it is about it, but wild animals are attracted to my garage.  I’m serious!  I’m more accustomed to walking into the garage and finding a random animal than not.  Usually they’re just one time sights and then they’re gone, but occasionally the animal (whatever species) will stick around for a while.  There have only been two times where we had to call a wildlife specialist in to remove them, however.  The first time was a squirrel nest about five winters ago.  They crawled in through a hole where the wall met the roof and began nesting on top of the fuse box.  We thought they were just coming in from the cold for a couple of days but soon we discovered they had actually had babies!  We ended up having to wait a couple of months when the little ones were mobile and would be able to survive outside of the nest before a professional came and removed them; that was an adventure.

While the squirrels were frustrating (mother squirrels are very defensive!), that was nothing compared to the raccoons.  It was summer time about two years ago, I still to this day do not know how they got in but one night I came home from work to see one full grown raccoon staring at me as my garage door opened.  I pulled in hoping it would run out the door but instead it scrambled up to the top of our storage shelves.  Again, I left it alone hoping it would be gone by morning. Instead, the next day I woke up to find my car covered in dirty paw prints and to see several of our storage boxes knocked over and opened.  This happened every night for about two weeks before we could get someone to come out and get rid of them.

In between the squirrels, the raccoons, and now, we’ve had a few other interesting run in’s; these, however, were just small.  Not long after we first moved in, my husband went into the garage for a bike pump and got sprayed by a skunk that had wandered in the night before (that was a bad day).  A couple of months ago my daughter found a bat hanging from the roof, not long before that we had a robin sleeping on the garage door runners, and just last week we had an actual deer sleeping on the dog bed! Along with a few other random encounters and a mice problem a few years back, I can’t figure out what animals are so attracted to in my garage!  I guess it’s a mystery we’ll never solve.

What’s in the Air Duct?

There’s an animal in the air duct of my home, I’m not exactly sure what animal(s) it is though. A few years back we had some problems with mice in the walls of our home and of course occasionally our cats would bring a mouse in alive, but with a little bit of poison it took care of it! I set out some of the same stuff this time but whatever the animal is, it’s still clunking around up there.  Not to mention, the sounds that it makes are almost definitely from an animal larger than a mouse.

Since the house backs up to a forest-like area, wildlife is common around the yard, and since it’s happening on the lower level of the house, it’s possible that it’s a skunk, right?  Now that I think about it, the other night I heard it walk from one end of the vent to the other and I could smell the slight distinction of skunk.  But that wouldn’t make much sense, no matter how close the outside of my house is to the ground, the venting isn’t low enough for a skunk to climb into it; at least not any skunk that I’ve seen,

Okay this shouldn’t be too hard to figure out, if it’s not skunks or mice it could be squirrels? Raccoon’s maybe? Actually, raccoons would make sense, I usually only hear sounds at night and I can tell that they’re leaving the air vents and then coming back later.  I was thinking about just closing off the vent they’re using to get in when I hear them leave at night but I guess if the animal in the air duct is a raccoon then it’s entirely possible that it has babies inside right? This is definitely something I’ll need a second opinion on.

Something Fishy

There are mice in the crawlspace of my house. I can hear them running around there and in the walls and I am this close to losing my marbles. I’ve set out poison and I’ve set out traps, I even had an exterminator come but let me tell you what good that did, he just left a couple of bait bags in the wall and crawlspace. Well if my poison didn’t work then why would his! My real problem isn’t just the mice, yes they’re annoying and smelly and could be causing who knows what damage to my house. My problem is that the other night when I brought home salmon to grill for dinner, large pieces of the fish went missing, and I know exactly where they went because I CAN SMELL THE ROTTING FISH IN MY WALL!!
Like I said, I’ve done everything I could think of to get rid of the mice in the crawlspace, I set traps, poison, and closed a vent hole in the wall trying to keep them from getting in; I even called in a cheap excuse for an exterminator and gave him my faith (and money). Before I know it I’ll be the crazy cat lady because I don’t know how else to get rid of them! And as if the mice and salmon weren’t enough, I’ve found holes in the backs of my cupboards and pantry and plenty of chewed open boxes and bags. They’re trashing my kitchen for goodness sake and using what’s supposed to be my food storage, as theirs!
Well call in Arnold Schwarzenegger because I’m ready to say “Hasta la Vista” to these pests. I’ll call whoever it takes, I’ll even tear down my own walls if I have to. I can’t live in this house for one more week with the putrid smell of mice AND fish. Tear gas, machine gun, blow torch, even Bruce Willis; I don’t care what it takes to get the mice out of my crawlspace and out of my life!

Something in the Air Vents

We were snuggled down ready to watch 50 First Dates when we heard it, something in the air vents. I was excited for date night, but there was nothing more I wanted to do than get out of the house when I heard the pitter-patter of tiny feet running underneath the floor. At first I thought it the air vent was broken, that’s how loud and disruptive the scratching and clicking was, but after we stopped and really paid attention, there’s no doubt it’s some sort of animal down there. As soon as I realized what was making the noise, I stomped all around the kitchen floor. I must have sounded like Dumbo jumping up and down as loud as I could, trying to scare it out of my house, but I guess it was no use. Later that night when I was getting water, I heard it again and choked on the water in my throat. After the near death experience, I drew the line. You could ruin date night and intrude on my privacy, but you can’t try to kill me! Whatever’s in those air vents better hide, and hide well.
After staying up all night doing research, I’ve decided it’s a rat, or maybe a mouse or even a squirrel; some sort of little rodent crawling around down there. I’m still not sure what it is but it’s definitely one of those three, I hope. If it’s any bigger than that I might have to just move somewhere else, most likely somewhere sunny and warm where animals don’t crawl into your air duct for warmth. I put out a trap the day after I first heard it, but it’s been almost a week and it’s getting more active! Instead of just running around in the evenings and at night like it was, it always seems to be awake! The problem is that I’m leaving for Switzerland tomorrow and don’t have time to get someone down here, how do I get rid of this thing in the air vents?!