Saturday 8 January 2011

Saturday news

Two more mice bite the dust - however many more can there be? There are currently 7 traps around the kick boards in the kitchen, and said kitchen has been cleaned to within an inch of its life so to speak today so that the mice don't find anything to eat!! They will have to go to the traps for food, so we should catch some more. We've been here 6 years and this is the first time we have had mice in the kitchen, so I am rather bewildered as to how they got in. Desperation in the cold weather recently possibly drove them to find a way in!!

2 comments:

sweet blondie blue eyes said...

You would be surprised at the tiny space a mouse can get in, we went round the outisde of the house with the mouseman and he showed me several places that mice could get through incuding one under the board just uner the roof, mice can ckimb. You need to go roung outside and see if you can find any tiny holes and fill them with fine wire wool, they cannot chew through that.

Mice will try anything I have some plastic boxes that originally contained biscuits, they had chewed all along the edge in one place trying to get into the box, mind you it was empty so they would not have struck lucky with that one.

Do you have poultry, if so you need to keep their food in a metal bin, the mouse man also said that using seed bells etc to feed the birds is not a good idea the mice will come for the seeds that are dropped on the ground. He also told me that he has seen a mouse jump from a wall onto a squirrel proof nut feeder, nick a nut and jump back down to the floor.

Spring is coming and they will exit when the weather improves. If you have a fitted kitchen take the kick boards off and check there are no holes at the back.

Living on a farm, mice are one of the things you have to bear I'm afraid.

Morgan said...

Yes, you are so right on a number of counts here! The OH was only saying last night that he wondered if they were getting into the roof and then migrating through the house using the water pipe runs. Funny that we don't see any anywhere else, but perhaps the kitchen is the only place they can get out of the system and into the house?? I did say we ought to set a couple of traps in the airing cupboard, though, as there are a lot of pipe junctions there too.
We live in a house so it is weird to imagine mice running up the outside of the walls, though!!

Chickens - yes, plenty of those here, and the garage where I keep the chook food is somewhere I would expect to see evidence of mice - but none there!! Might put a couple of traps down and see what happens there as well.

We don't feed the birds as the OH doesn't want to encourage them in the garden in case they nick the seeds we plant in the spring - and there are a lot of pigeons in the area as well. Good point though.