There's a mouse in the house...

So we’re starting small today - very small - with the matter of how to deal with some tiny guests trying to hibernate with us for the winter. When we moved in in January, there was what I’ll call ‘copious evidence’ of furry friends in the kitchen and over the summer we’ve had the occasional missing cookie but thought we’d nixed the problem by keeping everything in sealed jars or the fridge. Until, that is, my mother-in-law awoke to a small cache of seeds under her pillow in the spare room a few weeks back. Since then, similar bounty has turned up inside the hubby’s golf shoes and my knicker drawer (how?) and the final straw was when I found droppings by the kitchen sink. Ugh. We’re not sure if we’re dealing with mice, chipmunks or both, but with Dot in the house, we’re not keen on rodent co-habitation.

Clearly under our new littlegreendot regime, poison and inhumane traps are out of the question (thank god – I‘ve seen one of the mice and he was cute. Don’t want to discover him or his kin squealing with one foot stuck to glue trap, or worse). So I’ve been looking into alternatives.

At first I found this industrial-looking humane trap. But since it can catch ‘up to 30 mice’ and the site also features traps for minks, pigeons and ferrets, seems a little out of our league (I hope). Then I found this cutesy ‘smart mousetrap’ (site features tales of kids’ delight at freeing their new-found friends into the wild; cut to scene of me and Dot gamboling along the Delaware….) and was about to enter my credit card details when I thought, hm, made of plastic and will inevitably come delivered in copious packaging, both of which are strictly verboten. But no worries: Steve Smith and his Blue Peter stylee homemade humane mousetrap design to the rescue! (Equipment needed 1 tray, 1 baking dish, one bamboo skewer, one toothpick and a piece of cheese (I kid you not.)) Here it is:

So I’m just going to dig the bamboo skewers out of the moving boxes in the barn now. Will let you know how it goes. In the meantime, am experimenting with some plug-in sonic deterrent boxes kindly donated by my lovely friend Lucy. Maybe they’ll do the job so Steve Smith doesn’t have to….