BUZZ OFF, WALT DISNEY

Our first spring in the country was breathtaking, summer was resplendent, and autumn was overwhelming. And then winter arrived.

I love winter and could not wait to snowshoe over the meadows. I had a new book on animal tracks and was ready to differentiate dog tracks from coyote and fox. The firewood was stacked high––we’d never had a fireplace before––and I dreamed of reading by the glow of a fire with a dog on each side of me. I knew the icy roads would be a challenge, especially when I was on-call and had to tear out of here at 3 a.m., but bring it on! The colder the better, the more drifts the merrier. Bring on the ice, too––my skates were sharpened and ready to go.

You know who doesn’t like winter? Members of that not-so-exclusive club, mus musculus. Perhaps you’re familiar with its most famous members, Mickey and Minnie Musculus?

When the temperature drops, mice begin to worry. What will I eat? How will my brown coat look to a nighthawk when I scurry across the snow? Their DNA is screaming, “Get someplace warm, find things to eat, everyone go to the Gronbeck house.” Of course we expected to deal with mice when we moved to the country. We did not expect a mouse-tsunami.

We first noticed their calling cards in the dishtowel drawer. I could list some of the diseases carried by mice, and while they are very serious, it was the aesthetics of the situation that just wasn’t going to do––mounds of black droppings and little yellow stains on dishtowels, dishrags, and pot holders. We washed and bleached everything in the drawer many, many times.

They upped their game and began leaving deposits on our serving platters and the tops of cans in the pantry. (We don’t expect many dinner guests after this posting.) You could hear mice laughing as they ate through boxes of oatmeal. They chewed off the corner of a Rubbermaid bird-food canister that was designed to withstand being run over by a truck. I can break a tooth eating prunes.

It does not make much sense for a vegetarian to kill animals, so I sent my husband out for “no kill” traps. Meanwhile the mice ate the heat shield in his car. I laughed myself silly while he wrote out a big check for that, and then they ate the insulation off the wiring in my truck. Midas Man said I had to hang a sock full of mothballs under the hood to keep them away. That’s quite a treat when I turn on the heater.

One weekend my son was visiting, and we smelled smoke. I opened the oven door, and on the floor of the oven were two small fires. I sprinkled water on them. They continued to burn. I doused them. Still they burned. We had twice as many eternal flames as John F. Kennedy.

We got down on our knees and looked more closely. What was burning was a mystery substance in a conical shape, about 5-inches high and 4-inches at the base. I grabbed a spatula and scooped one burning cone out, dumped it in the sink, and ran water on it. 

We had been looking at a pile of flaming dog food. Kibble ablaze. The mice had carried these sizeable chunks from the dog dishes, across the kitchen, and into our oven. Apparently the grease in the food and the pilot light combined to create this little mousey memorial. I’m not sure whom they were memorializing since we were using those live traps. By using the traps, I mean owning them; we never did entice an actual mouse to enter those metal boxes. With the fire, we had graduated from disgusting to dangerous.

And then they went too far. I had six beautiful antique tablecloths. I kept them in a drawer upstairs and used them only when we had dinner guests. My favorite was a lovely shade of peach with a satiny finish. Some of its embossed leaves had a silver sheen if you caught them at the right angle. One afternoon I was preparing a formal table for some dear friends. When I opened that drawer, I saw a black spot the size of a quarter right in the center of the stack of tablecloths. It turned out to be a black hole. They had tunneled right down through the center of every cloth in the drawer. Even Lyndon Johnson would have declared war this time.

With an infestation this size, I needed to know exactly what I was dealing with, so I hit the mouse literature. The first alarming fact was that mice range in length from 3 to 14 inches including the tail. If we had 14 inch-mice, we wouldn’t have had an issue; we’d have had a new address. They weigh up 2 ounces.

 

We had seen several tan and white palomino mice, but it turns out mice are available in a variety of shades. And you’d think you were reading a list of L.L Bean sweater colors: chocolate, cordovan, lilac, blue, silver, dove, cream, black, coffee, cinnamon, gold, fawn, champagne. They have patterns, too: brindle, merle (swirled), and dark over a white base.

Mouse coats are available in satin, glossy, longhaired, curly, frizzled, frizzled satin, and hairless. I have a hair appointment next week; I'm asking for the frizzled satin for sure. Whiskers can be straight or curly. Some have tails, some not. One variety has big ears and is called a Dumbo. We were up against something far more complex than I had imagined. We could be pursuing a frizzled satin cinnamon or a chocolate brindle curly.

To solve our problem we needed to know about mouse behavior. We already knew a mouse could carry things long distances, like fetching almonds from our closed pantry downstairs on the west side of the house and taking them upstairs to a closed closet on the east side of the house, breaking into a zippered garment bag and stuffing the nuts down into the toes of my dance shoes. So, mice can go long distances horizontally and vertically.

It was more worrisome reading how mice can flatten themselves. It’s tough to keep something out if it can squish its head down to a ¼ inch high. The connective tissue between their skull plates is so flexible that they can get through a 7mm gap. A pencil lead is 2mm. You try to eliminate all the 7mm gaps in your house.  And these dudes can leap a foot straight up. That is the equivalent of me leaping 11 feet in the air.

Mouse brains only weigh 0.015 ounces, yet they were outsmarting us. We needed a plan.

The first line of defense would be to keep them out of the house in the first place. I squeezed tubes of chemicals into every crack and outlet I could find. I became vigilant about crumbs. All boxes in the pantry were replaced by plastic. I put charcoal briquettes in the basement. The books say mice hate charcoal, but they had, after all, started that campfire in our oven so I wasn’t too sure about this one. One website suggested placing the cardboard roll from toilet paper on the edge of the counter with about half hanging off the edge. Put a piece of cheese in there. The mouse runs in and when he moves toward the cheese, the tube tips, and he and the tube ride on down into a deep wastebasket waiting below. Sounded clever, but if a mouse can climb up a wall, why would a wastebasket pose problems?

I was so determined to use those live traps. I didn’t want the mice to suffer. I didn’t want poisons and anticoagulants around my dogs. Then I got out my calculator. The buck and the doe (truly) mate, and in 3 weeks, they have 4 to 8 little pinkys or pups. The pinkys mature in 8 weeks and start mating. Meanwhile, Mom and Pop are still producing a litter every 3 weeks and those babies go at it, too. By my calculations, those 2 mice were responsible for creating one thousand, four hundred, and ten mice in 24-weeks.

I put the calculator away, drove to town, and purchased two 24-packs of Guaranteed-To-Annihilate traps.

I am happy to report there are no more disgusting mice living in our house. Now they’re dying in our house. 2 or 3 a day. And on their way to the death chamber,  they still make a little pit stop in our dishtowel drawer.

For more about what mice hate:

http://www.ehow.com/about_4605743_what-do-mice-hate.html#ixzz1Dm7SkqjZ

For more about cheese in the toilet paper roll:

http://glass.typepad.com/journal/2005/09/how_to_catch_a_.html

For more fascinating facts about mice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse