Sunday, February 26, 2006

 

Ha, Mice make no more plans!

The mouse that invaded our house this week has finally met his match. We thought he had disappeared voluntarily but Sue's Juiced session was interrupted by a lightning-fast black flash out of the corner of her eye. After a lot of moving furniture and discovering how quick and small the mouse was, we discovered what it had been eating for the past week - peanuts.

We have a couple of bird feeders in the garden, one for seeds and one to take peanuts, and these are stored in the living room by the patio windows. In the corner of the room were a large scattering of brown peanuts skins and the occasional half-nibbled peanut. The trail of evidence let back to the bag of peanuts that until recently did not have any holes in it. I know worked out how peanuts has mysteriously appeared in the kitchen - I assume he had been carrying them away and been frightened into dropping them on the way.

So there I was at 3am in the morning, a piece of string held tightly in my hand, the other end attached to a box lid suspended precariously over a handful of peanuts. Around me I could hear scuttling as the mouse went behind cupboards and sofas on his nightly search for food. Eventually I saw him pop up near the patio windows and knew I would soon be going to bed. A quick dash and he was under the plastic crate lid and - yank - trapped! Now how do I get him out from under there?

In the study is a large clip-frame picture so I dismantled it and slid the back-board under the crate lid. The next step of the plan was to open the trap over a large black sack and drive off into the distance, releasing the rodent at some far point. The wheels came off this idea when Sue decided that the mouse was going nowhere near her car as it WOULD escape, no matter what I did. So I instead wrapped up warm and marched off towards the lake at 3:30 in the morning, hoping that the police I'd seen walking past whilst I was waiting for the mouse to reveal itself weren't still in the area.

The perceived wisdom is that mice will find their way home - to your home - if you release them up to 1,000m away. As the board and crate lid were very tricky to carry in the cold wind, trying not to let the board bend to release the mouse, I managed a Herculean 210m. Bye, bye "Rex", as Sue named him (after this Rex).


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