The Year of the Mice Bucket

Unlike last week’s post which wasn’t about bats in anyway, this week’s post is about mice so if you suffer from musophobia (that’s fear of mice, and this week’s vocabulary lesson) then you probably want to skip reading the rest of this.

Last night as Ron and I were watching television. We heard the pitter-patter of tiny mice feet above our heads. This reminded us of the time a few years ago, when an entire army of mice decided to invade the basement. They weren’t the first mice to make their way into this house, and Ron is always prepared with a nifty little gadget called a Mice Cube, which is just a little plastic live trap that’s perfect for anyone who prefers to deal with mice problems in a humane catch and release way.

Possibly due to a vacant house nearby getting cleared out, there were a LOT of mice that year. Our strategy has always been to wait until we hear the telltale rattle of a mouse in the plastic trap, before transferring the trap to a secure container (aka a plastic leftover container with air holes punch in the lid) and transporting the little rodent a few miles down the road to a safe, more or less unpopulated place. (There’s a chance that this strategy is only serving to keep the hawk and fox populations well fed, and not really helping the mice in any way, but they can’t stay in the basement. So, this is the best solution we can come up with.) Word on the street (aka the internet) is that as long as a field mouse is relocated to a spot more than 2 miles away, they won’t find their way back to your house.

The rehoming routine had already been performed a few times that week, when late one evening Ron and I settled in to watch a movie. Not that it’s really relevant to the story, but it was the Adam Sandler – Chris Rock movie The Week Of. We made it about halfway through the movie before we heard the telltale rattle of the trap. We had caught another mouse. We were in the middle of our movie and it was late, and neither of us felt like driving down the road with a mouse in a plastic container. So, we decided it couldn’t hurt to take the little guy out to the far corner of the yard. It’s a big yard after all with all sorts of places that are perfect for a mouse to make his home.

So, a few minutes later we settled back on the couch to watch Adam and Chris yuk it up, and a few minutes after that we heard the rattle again. Once again we didn’t want to go for a drive so decided to try to do the backyard release once again. You know where this is going, don’t you? I lost track of how many mice we caught and released that night, and I think there’s a strong possibility we were catching and releasing the same mice over and over again. What I do know is that it took us about an hour to watch the last fifteen minutes of that movie.

That wasn’t the end of the great mouse saga of 2020. After our night of many mice we got smart. Sort of. We decided the backyard rehoming wasn’t working, but since we seemed to be catching so many mice, we needed to consolidate our mice-rehoming trips. Enter, the mice bucket.

What is a mice bucket, you ask? Well, it’s your standard 5 gallon plastic bucket, but with some air holes poked in the lid so that the mice don’t suffocate. Our “brilliant” plan was to simply lift the lid and shake a mouse out of the mice cube trap into the big bucket. What could go wrong? The walls of the plastic bucket were easily 6 or 7 mice tall.

So, we sit down to watch some television, and before too long we hear the rattle of the plastic trap. It was time to deposit our first mouse in the bucket. We took off the lid, and Ron shook the mouse out of the trap into the bucket. Then we peered over the side of the bucket to make sure the rodent was okay. The mouse began running circles around the bucket at hyper speed, and before we had time to take in this impressive athletic show, he leaped straight up in the air and nearly right out of the bucket. We both jumped back in surprise, and Ron quickly grabbed the lid and placed it on the bucket.

We had our first mouse in the bucket, but we realized we had a problem. We had underestimated the jumping ability of our little rodent invaders. If we tried to shake another mouse into the bucket, we risked the first one leaping straight out. Modifications were made to the mouse bucket lid. A slot was added that was big enough to accommodate the Mice Cube trap, with a special door that could be used to seal things up until another resident needed to be added.

Anyway, that’s the year we caught 14 mice in this house and relocated them, though as I pointed out it’s possible that some of those mice might have been the same mice getting caught again and again.

We have learned that a small mound of peanut butter works great as bait. Most of the time. One year, we had a mouse who found his way to the main floor of the house. (Most of the mice wind up in the finished basement.) The main floor mouse found his way to the pantry where he dined on rice, anisette toast, saltine crackers and macaroni. We know because he chewed holes in packages of all those products. While he was feasting on such delicacies, he was not tempted in the slightest by our peanut butter trap. Also he had this habit of only coming out of his hiding spots when Ron was nowhere in sight. So, it was always me yelping as I saw a little gray blur streaking across the floor, and Ron was beginning to suspect I was imagining him. Of course, all those little nibble marks in the cookies were a sure sign that the mouse was not a figment of my imagination. Finally, we decided to switch out the peanut butter for a little piece of cheddar. A short while later we finally caught the little gourmand.

One final word of advice for anyone who is struggling with mice invaders of their own and wants to go the Mice Cube route. Those little traps work great, but they are not completely mouse proof. We have found that smart mice can get their little claws under the plastic trap door, open it back up and make their escape.

Well, fingers crossed last night’s invader doesn’t tell all his mouse friends about this sweet new spot he’s found. I’d hate to have to break out the mice bucket again.

— Alissa