Man vs. Mouse

A couple of years ago a neighbor went in for a 'humane' trap that was rather ingenious and successful (at catching them at least.) It was clockwork and reset itself after each capture, flipping the subject mice into a container on the side. She got 6 in one trap one night. But the 'humane' tag is questionable really as, presuming they are taken so far into the wild as to not return, then most if not all will die of starvation anyway.
Seems to me that keeping them out is the best long term solution and that should be possible in a run (unlike a house but then we don't usually flick our breakfast all over the place and can open a jar :)
Having an ample and available food supply for a population boom then routinely killing what can only be a fraction of that population doesn't seem like a sustainable way either.
The mice that are showing up after dark now are noticeably very small (presumably youngsters) who can squeeze through the remaining gaps. They have dug a new tunnels but they are coming up between ever tighter gaps in the paving.
Ive got a length of 5 inch drainpipe which I could set a trap in (and the hens be kept away from it and the dead mouse.) Ill try a bit longer to exclude them all.
 
Thankfully, I've never had mice actually in the my house! I've always had house cats, which is a good deterrent, and I know there are a couple of ferals that come through my place at night. I have thought of getting one or two feral cats for outside, but so far, haven't done anything about it. Outside, I'm sure there are mice around, but I don't see them. They can't get the feed, so they are welcome to scurry around! :D
 
I've had mice inside the house in England twice and both times it was the cats that bought them in- domestic cats can't kill mice it seems, just catch them. The first time it was our cats and the mice set up nest in the tumble dryer next to their bed and ate their food. Second time it was in the floor spaces which were connected to the neighbours who both had cats- and the mice just kept coming!

Here is a totally different scale! Mice in France have been a huge problem since we got here. The first place they chewed the English electrical cables, the second they were in the loft being chased by the neighbours' feral cat (bumps in the night) and here the place was really infested. Fortunately all the cabling in France is in special sleeving and the pipes are copper so they don't get eaten, but the mice took the insulation off the boiler to use for nesting. We have caught well over 200 house mice in a year from the buildings (some of which share our loft space) and only now the catch rate has slowed down- had 13 snap traps going at one stage catching 6 every night. Now we have just 7 and catch perhaps one. The other problem is short tailed field voles which dig holes all over the land big enough to trip in. Our dog has caught and given to us about 100- how many she has eaten we don't know? Now they are in the vegetable plot digging nests in the beds- don't think we'll ever get on top of them. Fortunately the field voles show no interest in the chickens' food and remain outside their enclosure.

You'll find the small mice are just too small to trip any snap traps Rick- they just eat the bait (peanut butter or nutella). That's when the small humane traps are useful.
 
Sounds like you've got the outside covered by the feral cats already Lady A. My run being foxproof also makes it catproof so once the mice are inside the neighbors cat can only watch them through the wire. Before the foxproofing, I would go into the run sometimes and think I had a black and white chicken in the nestbox but it was the cat sitting on the eggs!
Good idea with the traps Chris. At least with those the mouse will be inside in the morning and I wont have to bother with the drainpipe to stop some silly chicken tying to swallow a mouse in one go. So then I'll have to get a snake! :)
 
chrismahon said:
I've had mice inside the house in England twice and both times it was the cats that bought them in- domestic cats can't kill mice it seems, just catch them.
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All my cats have come from feral stray stock though. So they've all been fierce hunters (and killers!). They do "play" with mice a lot before killing them, female cats in particular. That's instinctive though, as that's how they teach kittens to hunt & kill. They exhaust and terrify the prey, before bringing it to the kittens, to practise their skills on. Big cats, lions/leopards etc. do the same thing. Not with mice, but with things like wild piglets. Awful to watch, but as the saying goes, nature is red in tooth and claw. If they don't do it, their cubs will die.
 
My domestic moggy is a good hunter and fortunately seems to have got the message that I don't like live mice running around my bedroom. Now I just listen to the thumps and bangs as he throws the dead mouse for quite a while before eating it. He also catches short tailed voles which aren't so bad as they can't seem to climb like the mice do.

I thought it was actually illegal to trap animals and release them elsewhere, although I know it is done with foxes in some areas. In any case I would have thought that releasing rats in a field behind the house would just mean they come back ...
 
LadyA said:
You know what I've discovered??

But now, around the ground outside, there were loads of the tiny insulation beads! opening the cover, I discovered a hole had been gnawed in the side of the cover, leading into the wall of the house! So, that's obviously how the mice got in. I'm thinking of using expanding foam on that, and have now sealed off the actual cover. And will enquire about getting it repaired/replaced. And will not think about the dead mouse/mice in the wall!!
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Hi LadyA.
Don't bother with expanding foam- the mice will chomp straight through it & leave a nice big hole & a right mess. (Been there; tried that!)

What I found worked a lot better was to fill the holes with metal dish scourers. The mice haven't chewed through these & they've been in place for three years. Success!
 
That was inspired Icemaiden! Ive been using offcut bits of mesh scrunched up to do a similar thing with hard to cover/fill gaps.
I'm trying an ultrasonic mouse repellent plug in unit in the run tonight. I put the camera in about an hour before turning on the power on the unit. We shall see if its hocus pocus or not! (Edit: HOCUS POKUS! On trail camera they totally ignored the ultrasonic unit and even sat next to it on several occasions through the night.) It seems that the chicken hearing range is quite low, up to 7 or 8 KHz - makes sense as they only produce fairly low frequency sounds themselves so I'm not worried that the chooks will be bothered by it at all but we also do get some bats around here in the night and they most certainly would. If it works (I'm expecting no triggers on the camera after 9pm) then Ill put it on a PIR so it only works briefly if a mouse is running around in there and is off in daylight when the hens are up as I think a blackbird etc would be able to hear it as well.

Some of these 'advanced' high frequency repellent units are claiming that they inject some sort of phase shifted signal into the house wiring to keep mice away from the whole system. That I am skeptical about! If a mouse was bothered by, or sensitive at all, to electro-magnetic fields then it wouldn't chew through the insulation on a live cable. Maybe they can sense cables where current is moving (with corresponding EMF) - maybe thats the reason for the phase shift - maybe I'm over thinking this!
 
Absolutely no effect on the mice whatsoever!!!

Its very disappointing. I'm going to take this thing apart and see if its doing anything at all by design other than having a small red light on the front.
 
We had mice chewing through the plasterboard walls in the kitchen LadyA. I filled the hole with interior filler and within an hour they had chewed through it before it had set! What worked though was cutting polypropylene string into 10mm lengths and breaking it up, mixing with filler into a dough- they couldn't chew through that. The plugs stayed in place untouched for the next 4 years.

We have friends who swear by their ultrasonic mouse deterrents (bought in England) Rick. They put one in every room in the house and the next day the mice had vanished.
 
chrismahon said:
We have friends who swear by their ultrasonic mouse deterrents (bought in England) Rick. They put one in every room in the house and the next day the mice had vanished.
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It is possible that it is just a duff unit out of the box. The first one I tried was in the upstairs bedroom as one had been seen up there and it was interesting that the camera in the coop saw more in the run that night and no more seen upstairs, as if they had been evicted. I will try the one from the bedroom in the run tonight and see if they all migrate back in the other direction. Stand by for the screams!
... Its also possible that the volume is insufficient outside in open space rather than in a room. The only change in their behavior I could see is that they drank much more water than usual - goodness knows what that is about.

... Well they will have been thirsty digging the tunnel I just found that goes all the way round the inside edge of the dust bath but ends at a brick corner with no gaps. So they are already in the run and can leave the same way they came in but spend their time trying to re-connect their tunnel out of the run via the dust bath. Its no wonder they are so successful! (except not in that particular project.)
 
No, unfortunately, these devices are not working for me. Over a hundred triggers like this last night (10 second videos). I didn't want to change anything else up till now to see if the devices would keep them away but its back to fencing etc now. Interestingly, green light (glowing on the unit in the background) is supposed to make mice sleepy (in the night, being nocturnal) and I know it has pretty much no effect on chickens (unlike the red end of the spectrum content of daylight etc.)
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Reminds me of a film where a vegetable plot was being decimated by a rabbit and yet the owner couldn't see anywhere it could get in. Finally the penny dropped and he realised he had fenced the rabbit inside the plot- so he just opened the gate and let it out.

Perhaps you could remove the feed and water from the run, put some outside and leave the run open Rick to make sure they are not living in there?
 
That would be very funny and marvelous solution Chris! :) But there is absolutely nowhere in the run to hide in the day. The floor is block paved and covered in just bedding. Nothing else on the floor or walls except the new perch and nest box standing in the middle and thats an open frame apart from removable rubber mats to shade the nests which lift out. The dust bath is the only place they could hold out in the daytime but I have followed their tunneling in there several times to make sure they haven't been successful in finding a gap in the brickwork and have dug it out completely several times - no mice.
I think they may live under the neighbors old shed.
Its this silly extension on the back of the run. It only adds a couple of square meters, if that and the chooks rarely go in there. It makes a handy segregation area but the hens all get along fine at the moment.
So the easiest thing to do is fence it off and knock it down! At least then I can properly test my efforts in the main run.
 
Your move mice! It was getting dark and the image is a bit blurred.
They can still get in - ran out of time - but I think I know all of the places now. Presuming they wont climb over the DPC at the first rail height. They haven't seemed to been able to cross it elsewhere so far. Lily the cat can prowl right round the perimeter now (and is busy already.)
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Well the proof, re the human, is in the pudding!
They found a way in via the dust bath again last night. I packed some mortart in the gap this morning before leaving for work. Going to render it inside at the weekend.
Your not fa off in jest their Marigold. They seem never happy with a plan A. As soon as they are in and have had lunch the work starts on plans B, C, D and E.
 
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