Mouse catching advice

[Chris71]

A few nights ago I saw a small dark blob whizzing across the far side of the living room. At the time I thought I was going mad, but last night I saw it again, and I'm pretty sure the scurrying blob is in fact a mouse.

Has anyone got any advice for catching mice with a humane trap? This is upstairs in a small maisonette, so I have no intention of poisoning the mouse (I'm clinging to the naive assumption that it's just one...) and letting it rot away behind the sofa somewhere.

Peant butter or chocolate on a trap set near to the wall seems to be the consensus. Does anybody have anything to add - best time of day to catch them? Any other tips?

And, no, a 12 bore isn't an option.

[Chris71]

Ikemi said:

shtu said:

Mice stick the the edges of a space, rarely will you see them cross an open space as it leaves them wide open to predators (eg, Owls).

Exactly. OP, are you sure it wasn't one of these?

It was skirting a large box near the wall on one occasion and the wall itself on the other. Fairly sure it was a mouse - a spider with a body the size of a mouse doesn't bear thinking about.

I'm amazed it got in. There's a pronounced step at the front door, which leads straight into a staircase. There's nothing else on the ground floor, just a garage (very PH...) so either it's scaled the stairs or gone up the through the walls somehow. That must be like scaling the Eiger a dozen times over if you're a mouse - I almost feel it's earnt its place (again, sticking to the singular!)

[Chris71]

Not really a cat person, though, and we don't have time to look after a dog. Not that having a couple of dogs lolloping around ever seemed to keep the mice out of my parents' house - but that's an ancient contraption in the countryside, not a new-build in suburbia.

[Chris71]

croyde said:

Had a poisoned mouse die under the floorboards of the room that I was decorating to be our first child's nursery.

First it was the smell then one day I heard what sounded like a buzz saw coming out of the room. I looked in and the only window was black with loud angry flies whilst more were climbing through the floorboards and waiting for their wings to harden.

The horror.........

Yep, that's precisely the sort of thing I'd like to avoid.

To be honest, I'd like to avoid killing them full stop.

The other thing is, it's a rented house. I'm happy to stick out a couple of traps, but if it turns out we've got a vast colony of the things in the loft it possibly falls to the landlord to get it sorted.

[Chris71]

fatboy b said:

The problem round our house is that it's prime mouse territory. Big orchard at the bottom of the garden, barn on one side, and neighbours with bird feeders on the other two sides.

Ours is quite the opposite. Its basically a first floor maisonette above a row of breeze-block garages built in about 2007. It's the last place I'd have expected to find mice.

We set traps around the living room (the only place I've seen one) on Friday, but yet to see or catch a single mouse. Very occasionally we hear a brief scurry coming from the loft. I'm still clinging to the idea that it's one individual whose now retreated to the roof. No sign of droppings or anything.

To be fair, at this point we should probably alert the landlord before it/they start chewing through power cables or anything. I'd really hoped to purge the house with non-lethal means, but that's looking a bit less likely.

[Chris71]

highflyer said:

Are they in the cupboard under the kitchen sink?

Yep, that turned out to be the case.

Our humane traps failed to do the job and the other day the landlord sent a pest control service round with bait boxes and a load of the 'fly paper' type sticky traps.

Last night we heard a scratching behind the kick boards under the kitchen units. It remained in the same place, making quite a racket, when we've never even heard any activity before so I assumed something was trapped. I'm not usually the squeamish type, but I do have a soft spot for animals and I wasn't particularly comfortable with the idea of leaving one to starve or dehydrate to death on a sticky pad.

I removed the sideboard and sure enough there was a mouse stuck to the paper and scrabbling away for dear life. Initially I wasn't too worried and just calmly pondered whether to try and release it outside - which my fiancee assured me would be impossible due to the paper - or put it out of its misery. I decided to have a quick go at helping it off the sticky pad, which rapidly became an all-consuming obsession. Half an hour later, face contorted with concentration and perspiring like the bomb disposal expert in a cheap B-movie I was still desperate to get it free.

Amazingly, I succeeded. By holding the paper strip vertically just above the bottom of a bucket and helping it's back legs off the pad with a screwdriver (not as brutal as it sounds, trust me...) I got the mouse free. Even more surprisingly it appeared unscathed by the ordeal and was running round quite happily in the bottom of the bucket.

Then it all went a bit wrong. As I was frantically looking for something to cover the top of the bucket, Super Mouse leapt a clear foot out of the top. It scooted across the kitchen floor at great speed and leapt clean through an access slot in the opposite sideboard that I didn't even realise existed.

I removed the sideboard, but the mouse was long gone. Having got so involved in the process only to see it disappear off - presumably to endure a nasty end on one of the landlord's other traps - was honestly one of the most demoralising experiences I can remember.

So, two lessons:
1) Don't name your vermin. You won't want to 'off' Bob when he's staring at your with those frightened little eyes.
2) Either set lethal traps or humane ones. The fly paper types are horrible.