On 2014-07-25 11:44 AM, jmcquown wrote:
On 7/22/2014 5:39 PM, Christina Websell wrote:
"toci" wrote in message
...

Maybe if there's one mouse, there are more. Toci

He caught it in the garden and brought it in through the open back door..
There are lots of mice out there but even he cannot catch two at once;-)
No chance of house mice here.

I didn't have a cat at the time, but I once lived in a house where there
was some construction going on a couple of streets over. (New home
building.) This drove the field mice out of their usual habitat right
into the existing houses. My bag of cornmeal was eaten through; pretty
much any dry goods, in fact. The kicker was when I found one climbing
the shower curtain in my bathroom. I knocked it into the tub and
managed to scoop it into a shoe box and toss it outside. I'm sure it
came right back in. They find ways.

One night I was sitting in the den watching television when I saw
something out of the corner of my eye. There was a teeeeeeeeny tiny
mouse sitting on the fireplace hearth. It was so cute! It ran off
through a tiny hole in the panelling on the wall. I promptly blocked
that off.

Still, I couldn't have mice in the house. I set traps. In one night, I
heard the traps snap seven times in a row. It wasn't pretty nor was it
particularly humane, but I refuse to live with mice in the house.

Where I live now there aren't any mice. Marsh rats, yes. But they
don't come inside. The hawks and other predators catch them.

For many years, I lived in an old wooden house of a type that was
generally reputed to have a problem with mice, partly because it wasn't
as solidly constructed as newer ones (and mice need a very small hole to
enter through) and partly because it was one of a number of row houses,
and even if I'd managed to find all the tiny holes in a very poor
foundation, I couldn't count on someone down the road having done so.
The previous residents had had constant problems with mice, and had
trays of poison everywhere. I got rid of all the poison and moved in
with my two cats - Mandy and Betsy, both now RB.

Mice are less stupid than I had realized. They almost never entered the
house afterwards (although God knows what they were doing in the walls).
There was never any evidence of droppings. Once I found the cats
harrassing a very scared mouse, which I caught and released. Once I
found half a mouse. Not bad for well over a decade in an area with lots
of mice!

--
Cheryl