He enters your house unbidden, steals your food, dirties your floors, startles your guests, and then disappears as quickly as he came.
A ghost?
No, ghosts, to their credit, do not leave droppings on the kitchen counter or eat the peanut butter off the traps you set for them.
Your new friend, we regret to say, is a mouse.
As the weather turns colder, the little brown rascals with oversize ears and long, skinny tails head indoors, seeking warmth and shelter.
Along the way, they scramble our best-laid plans, shatter our nerves and make us seriously consider solutions that, only hours before, would have seemed either fanciful or barbaric: poison in the kitchen, glue strips that catch (and force you to execute) live mice, commercially available fox urine.
About 21 million American homes host unwanted rodents each winter, according to the National Pest Management Association. For the most part, those affected do their trapping in silence, but just say the secret password — “my mouse problem” — and they will reveal themselves to you wherever they are: at work, at home, in the pest control aisle of your favorite hardware store.
They will talk to you about their own solutions, from the tried-and-true Victor M150 mouse trap (a.k.a. the cheap wood one) to glue strips to cats.
And, in the queasy interval before your amateur mouse solution kicks in or the exterminator finds an opening in his busy schedule, you will hold these stories close to your heart — reminders that someday you, too, will triumph.
Today, we offer our readers a few of our own hard-won stories of rodents vanquished.
And wish those in the midst of the struggle good luck.
And ask those with mouse stories of their own to send them our way.
Now, it’s personal
A few years ago we had a couple of cheeky mice leaving droppings in our cabinets, chewing through boxes in our pantry and boldly scurrying through the living room while we watched TV — with shocked guests.
We bought snap traps but, in the morning, we found them licked clean but mouseless. We fruitlessly tried that sonic thing you plug in the wall to drive them out of the house. They went about business as usual. I had trouble sleeping, imagining mice might be nibbling at the toes of my helpless infant son. And worse, I found they’d gotten into a tiny bag of M&M’s jammed in the middle of my packed tote bag.
That’s when it got personal.
And that’s when we broke down and turned to a dreaded last resort of the mouse-afflicted urbanite: glue traps.
We put them out at night and the next morning I woke to a crashing sound in the kitchen, but my husband got to the scene before me and warned me not to enter until the site had been cleared. My husband seemed disturbed for days and I bugged him to tell me how it all went down. Like a vet of an ugly war, he suggested we leave that chapter alone.
And so I did, until one day when I reached for our light-duty hammer and found it covered in glue and tiny gray hairs and flecks of blood.
— Monica Eng
Patience pays off
When we lived in a dim garden apartment in Bucktown the depth of winter would bring mice to the hole in the wall behind our kitchen counter where the plumbing came through. We had mice, but we didn’t have a mouse problem. Not exactly. At night my wife and I could hear their tiny paws scratching away at the crumbled plaster. Being lazy we didn’t do much about it, partly because we saw no evidence that they ever came out from behind the cabinet.
Our two cats knew better.
The instincts of animals are impressive to watch. These cats showed impatience with just about everything that happened in our apartment, especially any move made by our arthritic 15-year-old retriever. But when it came to the mice, they had nothing but patience. Every night when we turned out the lights, the scrawny tiger, Russell, would be sitting motionless on the countertop looking down at that thin crevice between the cabinet and the wall. Alphonse, a burly solid gray, sat on the floor, head drooped, staring down that crevice.
We’d doze off in the silence and then be jolted back awake by the “thhwuump” of Russell pouncing. And then the screeches of tiny death: “eeek-eeek-eeek,” and then silence. Turn on the lights: no mouse.
Two or three days would go by and I’d pick up the folded quilt that the old dog used for a bed and out would fall a tiny, flattened mouse carcass. We never figured out if the dead mice for the dog were tributes or insults from the cats. We guessed the latter.
— David Heinzmann
Food for thought
At first, I thought it was a ball of dust or an old gray mitten lying there in the middle of our family room.
But as I got closer, I realized, with some horror, that it had four legs and a tail and appeared to be lying on its back.
Though the mouse looked dead, I felt there was at least a possibility that it was in a coma and might suddenly leap to life, then attack me.
So I pulled some rubber boots onto my feet, a pair of dishwashing gloves on my hands, an apron around my clothes and a baseball cap on my head, to protect as much of my exposed skin as possible.
Then I hurriedly swept the thing into a pan, dumped it into the garbage and immediately called an exterminator, in case the mouse had friends and relatives.
In a few days, a fellow in a uniform came over, bearing what he called “special food.” He placed little black boxes in every corner of the house.
“When the mice eat the special food in these containers,” he said with a smile, “they will start gasping for air. To get the air, they’ll go out of the house, where they’ll die.”
Works for me.
— Howard Reich
Sly like a fox
He was only two inches long — sans tail — but when I saw him on the dining room chair first thing in the morning, he looked as big as a terrier.
I’m not good with mice, and this wasn’t my first of the season. There was the one in the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon. The one that appeared under the TV while my husband was watching the White Sox.
I went the professional route and had an exterminator fill in a gap around a pipe where they seemed to be getting in. But that didn’t completely solve our problem and, with small children in the house, I wasn’t eager to use poison — the method of choice for many exterminators.
I caught two mice with those expensive plastic traps, then hit a wall. The little guys were eating the bait off the traps and walking off unharmed.
Desperate, I turned to the storied Victor M150, the trap composed of only a cheap piece of wood, a couple of strips of metal, and a big scary spring. On the advice of my new best friend, Internet mouse-hunter Trapper James (eopinions.com), I fiddled with the trap to make it more sensitive. (Basically I just bent the metal catch in the way that James suggests; I didn’t do that complex thing with graphite and steel wool.) I kept the peanut butter bait to an absolute minimum, applied it as per James’ instructions, used more than a dozen traps, and caught that pesky third mouse my first night out.
I’ve caught one more since then, but fear I have at least one more to go.
In the meantime, my neighbor Renee offers hope in the form of two words: fox urine.
Renee, 56, a nurse, has had mice in the past, but that all ended, she said, when she placed a commercially available form of the above-mentioned substance — it’s sold as crystals, not liquid — at strategically significant spots in her house and yard.
The stuff smells very faintly like a wet diaper, but Renee says it’s not noticeable.
And in the past two weeks, as my house — nearly identical to hers and across the street — has been witness to multiple mouse sightings, Renee’s has been, she assures me, mouse-free.
The only downside: the fox urine can work in more ways than one. After Renee recommended it to a neighbor’s mother who lives in North Carolina, the woman wrote that it worked beautifully on the squirrels that had been plaguing her.
“But please tell me,” the woman wrote. “How do I get rid of the fox?”
— Nara Schoenberg
nschoenberg@tribune.com
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You tell us
We want to hear your mouse tales. Write to ctc-tempo@tribune.com or Tempo, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. Please include your full name, hometown and phone number.
