Comments on: How to live trap a mouse

By: Artor

Artor — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 16:31:49 +0000

Greg, it depends on the snakes. Not all of them like dead mice. A friend has a rosy boa named Scarlett, and he feeds her home-bred rats. His momma rats are named Replicator Units #1 & #2. The stud rat goes by Ratfucker. Scarlett loves herself some live rat babies!

By: Karen

Karen — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 04:47:55 +0000

Had a terrible rat problem one year, until we figured out that an opossum had loosened the mesh that covered a subfloor ventilation entry. (It dawned on me one night when I went out on the back porch to see a pair of opossum kits playing up and down the orange tree; they’re so cute. But, where was Mom? Where were they — oh, hell, check the ventilation entries in the subfloor.)

Cover your entries, below your floors and in your attic! Keep the mousies and rats and opossums out!

And please, please, please, don’t use sticky traps, they’re a horribly cruel death. Use Havaheart traps, make your own live traps, or use an instant-death trap. Oh– and peanut butter works really well as a bait.

By: mark

mark — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 22:18:38 +0000

Black rat snakes living in my attic help. Their shed skins also help keep some people from poking about.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 21:12:52 +0000

Calli, I have been told that you don’t feed snakes live mice any more. They have learned to eat dead ones, often purchaced frozen in bulk. This was a great disappointment to me and I no longer want a snake.

By: Calli Arcale

Calli Arcale — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 21:04:34 +0000

We were trying to trap a mouse that was in our garage at the old house. It would steal the bait. But chipmunks were also getting in, and it caught an awful lot of them before we gave up on getting the mouse. Evidently mice are smarter than chipmunks, or perhaps just more cynical about free lunches.

My biology class built live traps so we could do a population study of field mice. The traps were built by taking buckets, bolting a rat trap to the inside, and then attaching hardware cloth to the inside of the snappy part so instead of slamming down on the bait, it would slam the mesh closed over the opening. Only one of the traps was even sprung. It caught a mouse. We dutifully marked and released the mouse, then set out traps out again a week later. Didn’t catch anything that time, so our experiment was deemed inconclusive. 😉

If I still had a pet snake, I’d get a live trap. Otherwise, lethal traps that kill quickly are my preference. (Not sticky traps. Those are cruel. Much worse to die of thirst than a snapped neck or crushed skull.) I do like the idea of an owl feeder, though. We do have great horned owls which hunt in our neighborhood.

By: Dunc

Dunc — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:14:50 +0000

If you are going to live trap, remember to check the traps frequently. Mice can dehydrate pretty rapidly, and that’s one of the less pleasant ways for them to die.

At least snap traps are quick. Usually, anyway…

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:49:17 +0000

That is very interesting. The cotton deer mouse is one of the more omnivorous of it’s genus. They are not known to eat roots very often. Which I mention only because, well, it’s my job to know that.

By: Sleazeweazel

Sleazeweazel — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:37:17 +0000

I live deep in the woods in a wooden cabin in north Florida. It should be mouse heaven yet for twenty years I never saw a mouse other than the white fuzzies that I feed to my snakes and to the owls outside. It was inexplicable. Then one night an absolutely endearing elfin creature leapt into my salad bowl. It was the cutest thing I had ever seen, a Peromyscus gossypinus, and I was delighted! For many months thereafter they never touched my food but gobbled up all the spiders which led to an increase in cockroaches. The only problem was the ever increasing number of tiny turds, so I reluctantly decided to live trap them. It was an abject failure. At first they werenâ??t interested in peanut butter but finally acquired the taste. Even then it was impossible to trap them. They can move faster than the speed of light, and yes, they can leap tall building with a single bound, so even sprung traps were always empty. Then I discovered something interesting, the kitchen raiders shat everywhere but the mothers were most fastidious and always used a public latrine located at least twenty feet from the nest. It was a winning strategy. They proliferated like brooms and buckets in the Sorcererâ??s Apprentice so I had no choice but to use extreme prejudice in the form of old fashioned snap traps, the mousetrap design that cannot be improved upon. I put one on my kitchen countertop, then later that evening while I was upstairs reading in bed I heard thumping, bumping and squeaking and thought, â??Aah, I finally got one!â? When I came down in the morning I beheld a scene of carnage. The bossdaddy mouse had been caught but all that was left of him was part of his head. What was left of the rest had been strewn around the kitchen, a foot here, a tail there, and a pile of entrails in the sink. His numerous wives and children had devoured him! I was disabused of my romantic notions and after that it was all out war! Now the spiders are back and all is well.

As for owls, for more than the last decade I have had multiple generations of barred owls that know me, take mice off peopleâ??s heads at parties, and personally introduce their fledglings which then become pests until they grow up and learn that white mice are a special treat only available during special events. Welfare owls are just like welfare people, demanding and whiny!

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:37:48 +0000

Yeah, but you might then end up with larger owls.

By: yeah

yeah — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:58:24 +0000

I have one cat that eats mice and one who doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do with them and lets them run across her tail. Guess which one my sister’s taking with her when she moves out? I wonder if neighborhood cats are likely to get to mice in an outdoor container like the kiddie pool mentioned above. There are several cats in my neighborhood who love to hunt for squirrels and birds, and a container of mice would probably look like a buffet to them.