Gil -Ferrets can be very unpleasant to smell... I had a stepdaughter who kept two (along with a half-dozen cats and gawd knows what other pet-hoarding my mind has blanked on over 30 years ago). They also are totally nocturnal and will romp *all night*, especially if there are more than one (or have a cat or a dog to harass/play with). I'm sure ferrets (if they get outside) are hell on birds (especially eggs?), housecats (if they get outside) can be pretty bad too. I think Ferrets will consume their prey unlike cats who will play with them for hours and hours and then bring at least a partial carcass to you as a gift. Snakes even more better at full-consumption, I understand they can defer defecation until 99% is digested?...
I'm too frugal to throw kill-traps away, but you could follow Tom's advice and I'd bet by the time you threw a dozen traps (with head-crushed mice in them) into the trash, you might be done with them (for this season)... or a handful of kill traps re-used nightly might rid you over a week's time. I don't know how territorial they are but I get the feeling that I never have more than *one* family in my house when they do infiltrate... but their reproduction rate is pretty extreme and one family can become dozens in a short time.
On 1/3/23 2:47 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
Steve, those are all great tips. I'll run a fine tooth come through the house. Their's this area by the coffee maker at the front they try to hide in as well as I think somehow behind a rubermaid recycle bin. lol a ferret? not a bad idea. Kim swears by his pet cat for keeping mice out. LOL one of my doctors tells me how his pet beagle chases mice around. I guess the pooch also OCD's on anything not Human and barks or tries to hunt them. I've read tht ferrets can make preem pets, as long as you can keep them from getting bored. I think Santa Fe isn't fond of people having them forpets something about birds.On Tue, Jan 3, 2023 at 2:18 PM Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote: Gil - To misquote Leonard Cohen: "There is a crack in everything, that is how the mice get in". I have lived with mouse-flux all of my time in my current (rural)property 20 years). The mice (and ground squirrels and packrats) in the environs require that I remain vigilant to keep them living outside my home. This has involved a lot of care around making sure that doors fit (and close) tight and that any wall-penetrations (dryer vent, etc) be well managed/screened, etc. Virtually *every* Fall I recognize that one or more mice have taken up residence in some nook or cranny inside my house... evidenced primarily by foodstuffs nibbled on my counter and of course "droppings". Sometimes the sight or sound of scurrying. If I trap these invaders quickly enough I don't have a whole family (or several) and even worse, multiple generations take up residence. I've been a vegetarian most of my life but I still would stoop to kill-traps to stop this business right away. When Mary moved here (5 years ago now) her (yet) softer heart lead me to buy a decent no-kill trap which was limited to a single-catch per night nominally. It still worked. Equally important for me has been to have a live mousing-cat in the house... even though I've never had one catch/kill more than one or two in a season, I think the presence and threat helps to reduce the number of mice willing to force their way in when the opportunity is found... I don't know if any voluntarily move back out once they realize what they are facing. Last winter I finally buttoned up a sunroom I'd had 90% finished for years... this included replacing the raw adobe floor with a clay-plaster finish, sealed with walnut/citrus oil. The adobe floor (and cement bancos, etc) could absorb/hide a lot of mouse-droppings/activity that the new surfaces patently just enhanced... so the flux of mice in my sunroom was mostly ignorable/tolerable or in any case too hard to try to eliminate. With the new finish it was just the opposite, and thoughtlessly, the walnut-oil surface in the process of (many months long) curing fully was a terrible attractive nuisance. I think the little buggers thought it was a buffet laid just for them. We had evidence of quite a few mice living in there and even when we were catching and expelling one per night, there was a never ending supply. There were nominally *no* holes for them to get in, but if you've seen my construction techniques you might not be surprised to find that I actually *did* have a few *hidden* weak spots where they might have entered. Our 20 year old cat had gone blind the Fall before (quite gracefully) and finally passed away on her own that winter... so no more mouser or even the whiff of a threat of a mouser in the house. We then went away for 2 months with several different house-sitters in the house who had not instruction nor reason to try to keep up with the mouse flux. Besides, I was used to mouse-infestation being entirely a winter-time phenomena. When we returned mid-summer I sat in the living room with the final house-sitter who was scheduled to leave the next day and I sequentially set, caught/released 6 mice in the space of a couple of hours. The trap was just outside the room we were sitting in and I could see the little buggers playing chase on the floors, bancos, furniture as well as dancing over the top of the trap and teasing their way in and out of the trap before finally springing it. I went on to catch several each evening (at twilight and beyond) until we were down to rarely seeing more than two chasing through the room... and catching one per night. Hole after potential hole was plugged during this time. And yet they keep coming. There is a chance these are recycling, we haven't gone to the effort of notching their ears or painting their tails or anything. My experience in this environment is that there will always be dozens (hundreds) of field mice aspiring to become house-mice... so killing (or hauling far away) the ones we catch probably doesn't change that much. I now wish I hadn't moved the three bullsnakes I caught eating eggs in our chicken coop across the rio grande, but invited them to live in the sunroom... I think they are better (yet) mousers than a cat. We now have a fresh mouser who doesn't have continuous free access to the sunroom (lest the buggers re-invade the house proper) but who does spend time out there stalking the hell out of every nook and cranny... she hasn't caught any yet (though she did help catch a few who had gotten into the house before we could trap them). My best recommendation is to eliminate any food-attractive-nuisances (refrigerator, cupboard, animal-tight containers, etc), make sure you have no known extgerior wall-penetrations (even the tiniest cracks they seem to squeeze through) and then go on a trapping frenzy... clean up any trace of mice ASAP so that you *know* if you have any left as you trap them down to near zero. And I recommend a housecat (or two), though I know some do not like keeping cats. Maybe a ferret or a schnauzer? My best ever Gopher-Getter was a weimerainer who would sit for hours at the entrance to a gopher burrow just to grab one... if allowed, she might have cleaned them entirely out of the yard. We limited her time OCDing out in front of gopher holes... it was hard to watch. Or maybe a bullsnake (or one of many other rodent-eating varieties)? On 1/3/23 11:52 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:Yeah, I buy traps from Amazon a couple dozen at a time. ======================= Tom Johnson Inst. for Analytic Journalism Santa Fe, New Mexico 505-577-6482 ======================= On Mon, Jan 2, 2023, 10:45 AM Gillian Densmore <gil.densm...@gmail.com> wrote: Another surge of mice Q: For all of Dismember i've had nothing but an ongoing trickle of mice. what the is going on here? Is anyone else having mice issues as well? -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . 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