Which, in turn, reminds me that I’ve been meaning to ask around about color morphs. Where I grew up, gray squirrels were gray. I lived in Boston for many years, and gray squirrels there were … also gray. Well, the ones in Harvard Yard were more a shade of grey. Anyway, here in the Twin Cities area, they are pure white, almost jet black, or gray. Some of the gray ones are reddish gray.

So, here is my question: Am I living in a region where there is unusual diversity in the color morphs of Sciurus carolinensis? What is the diversity of gray squirrel pelt color in your region?

And why?

First, on the bait. Mice are granivores, so attract them to grain. The ultimate grain … the orgasmically excellent purest grain-extract champaign of grain, the grain that a mouse will (literally) die for … is wheat germ.

Wheat germ does not behave well in a trap situation, so mix the wheat germ with peanut butter so you can stick it on stuff.

There are several kinds of traps that work well. You should browse around for the current appropriate Havahart trap. These are cages with one or two two ways in/out, a platform hooked to a trigger, and two doors that close the trap when the platform is tilted. You get the mice to tip the platform by putting the afore mentioned mixture of wheat germ and peanut butter on it.

The second kind of trap is home made. For this you need two things: A container and a way to get into the container. I have used two versions of this with great success.

The first is a vase, as shown. This vase has to be tall enough and have a sufficiently narrow neck that a mouse cannot jump up and out of it. Now, people will tell you that a mouse can jump ten feet and climb up vertical glass, but that is a bunch of hooey. A typical 1.5 foot high Victorian porcelain or white stoneware vase will work, if you smear Vasoline(tm) petroleum jelly around the rim.

The other type of container that has worked for me is your typical milk can. These are usually about three feet tall, and you want to use it without the top. A mouse in one of these things cant’ get out.

All you have to do with either container is put the wheat germ (with or without peanut butter) in the container, and place the container near anything the mice can climb on. A pile of newspapers, a chair, whatever. The mice just need to get in to the container. They won’t be able to get out.

Of course, at the end of all of this, you need to have a place to put the mice. If you drive the mice to a different neighborhood and dump them there, be aware that you are probably violating state law if you are in the US. Transporting wild(ish) animals and releasing them, any distance, is usually illegal. You might consider keeping them in a cage until they grow old and die of natural causes. But also, keep in mind that if these mice are deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) they could be carriers of Hanta virus.

If you have a friend with a snake, maybe just feed them to the snake. Or, if you have a back yard and live in a place where owls live, you could make an owl feeding station. For this, you just need the minimum size child’s wading pool to keep the mice from getting away (no water in the pool, please!). Put that in your back yard, toss the mice in there, and the owls will eventually come to eat them.

Unless you live in Arkansas where every 8-year old boy is issued a rifle, and therefore, there are no owls or raptors of any kind. If you do this in Arkansas, you’ll just get snakes. Lots of snakes.

Lawrence Heaney, team leader and curator at the Chicago-based Field Museum of Natural History, said the rare dwarf cloud rat was last seen by British scientists some 112 years ago.He said the rat was dead when the team found it in a canopy of a large tree whose branches were covered by thick moss, orchids and ferns at a national park in Mount Pulag in northern Luzon, the Philippine Daily Inquirer said.The animal was described as small “with reddish brown fur, a black mask around its large dark eyes, small round ears, a broad and blunt snout and a long tail covered with dark hair,” the report said.”It is the animal whose existence had baffled biologists for so many years,” Heaney said.The animal has been preserved and is being prepared for shipment to Chicago for further studies….

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