Thread: Mice. Heaps of bloody mice.

You may recall that recently we had a rat problem; the bastards got into the underfloor cavity beneath our bath, the young died in situ… and then stunk. Second time this has happened. Anyway I fixed that mess up, and made some improvements along the way (who new bloody bathroom - opportunistic wife). We made violent war on the rats and caught both ship rats and some very large Norway rats (it was the latter that had made it into the bathroom floor). I haven’t caught a rat in over a month now, and there is no evidence of their presence in the usual places as I keep those areas meticulously clean so I can easily spot new rat droppings.

During this process I bought a dozen new mouse traps, very effective plastic ones with a hair trigger mechanism that has always produced a mouse when set off. I set up the traps in pairs, wired to a short length of timber, so if anything tried to run away with my trap (e.g. a rat), he’d have a large appendage to deal with.

The problem is that we are catching crazy numbers of mice, every day. Not Aussie mouse plague crazy, but averaging 6-7 a day, every day for 7 weeks straight. Record is a full house (twice) of a mouse in every one of the 12 traps, some days its just a couple. Definitely seem to catch more close into the house when it’s wet. Warm dry nights seem to be less productive. I reckon we’re up close to 300 trapped mice by now since mid-March. Mix of baits - keeping them fresh is the key. Peanut butter, dripping, mackerel, jam, cheese. We catch them around the back of the garage and in front of the wood shed.

We have two resident moreporks that are here most evenings at the same time. We didn’t used to have them so close, so regularly, they are almost part of the family now. No prizes for guessing why they are here…

I wonder what is driving this apparent sudden increase in the mouse population. There’s no new food sources that we can think of. No new habitat or any changes to habits and procedures around the block. We’ve always run mousetraps just as a precaution, but going back years you’d catch one or two every now and then. Nothing like now. When we reorganised the shed in March (again), we could see we had a problem as there was suddenly a bucket load of mouse droppings in the dark corners that definitely wasn’t there in late January.

What’s up I wonder? I’d love to know what governs these pest populations, what drives their coming and going. If we’ve caught this many already, how many are there FFS??? With the predictions of another warm winter and warm years to come with a persistent La Nina, what do we have in store?

(We also have this incredibly annoying small black fly problem as well (the Aussie cluster flies), it’s driving the whole community bonkers, especially those poor buggers they don’t have fly screens like ours.)

Here’s 5 from this morning, I found another 2 this arvo when I got home. I’m quite sure if I doubled the number of traps I would be catching a lot more!