Mouse Patrol

Everywhere I go in Sandwich this fall, the main topic of conversation is mice and how to get rid of them. Last year was a “mast year” for oaks and beeches. Every few years the trees produce an extraordinary load of acorns and nuts. Rodents take away the seeds and bury them places where they sprout in the spring making new trees. Makes sense, right?

The problem for us is that the mouse population grows during a mast year (2017), then they get really hungry when it’s not a mast year (2018), and they go hunting for food. They go into barns and houses and cars, nibbling on anything and everything. Fruit left out on a kitchen counter? Delicious! A bag of oats stashed in a basement pantry? Irresistible! Wires in a car engine block? (Uh, oh — you know where this is going…)

mouse house

We’ve tried spraying peppermint oil and planting Irish Spring soap to ward off the little rascals, but not only have those “natural” remedies failed, but the mice brazenly nibble on the soap. How rude! And so, we must use traps.

Being the total soft-hearted wus that I am, I use “catch and release” traps. I have three different models of these little mouse houses that I bait with pieces of cracker topped with a dollop of peanut butter. The mouse enters, triggers the door to close, enjoys a yummy snack, and waits until morning when the adventure begins.

I call it my Mouse Relocation Project. I load any occupied mouse houses into a backpack, strap Beau’s bright orange vest onto him (it’s deer hunting season, after all) and off we go on our morning walk with the plastic mouse houses rattling. When we get to the “Mushroom Road,” we go to a particular hole in a stone wall and release the mice into the hole. (Read about the Mushroom Road in Stone Walls.)

Go find your friends!

In my fantasy world, the mice are reunited in the stone wall where they are busily making their cozy nest for the winter. They are decorating with pine boughs (okay, pine needles) and berries, and they’re busily stashing acorns. (See the oak leaf in the photo?) The wall is far away from our Little House, so there’s no way the mice will come back. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. If you’d like to see a wee video of a mouse release (you know you want to!) click here to go to my YouTube station.

Beau with our litter haul

After the mouse release (which Beau strangely ignores), we continue on our walk, sometimes picking up litter along the road. (Stop throwing those beer cans out of your pickup truck window. You know who you are!) After two months of passing the garage sale sign, I decided to repurpose it. Perhaps I’ll have a garage sale. Hmmmm….. The cans go to the Transfer Station for recycling (see Don’t Call it the Dump!).

Of course my Mouse Relocation Project could be ultimately doomed. How smart are mice anyway? Have you read Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH? (It was a book club selection at Sandwich Central School, and Elsa and I read it during Cooking School.)

As the story goes, there were also mice at the National Institute of Mental Health who received mysterious injections and became capable of reading, high-level reasoning, and even engineering. Could it be possible? Well, last night a mouse managed to take the snack from inside the mouse house without triggering the door. Imagine a Tom Cruise mouse hovering from the ceiling, nabbing the cracker, and extracting itself without touching the pressure-sensitive floor. Mission Impossible? Maybe not.

And so we begin the slide into winter (Mount Chocorua is already snow capped), hoping the mice have made their homes elsewhere. Be gone mice, and fare thee well.