The House Mouse

I know I’ve written before about the nuances of living in the Northwoods:  Bears, armies of squirrels, snow up to your eyeballs, but there is another little aspect that I haven’t mentioned.

Mice.

You see, if you bring enough elements together, you are basically setting out a vacancy sign for the little rodents to move in.  And those elements are wood and leaves.

And we have plenty of both.

So when Old Man Winter shows up, you can almost guarantee that one or more will find its way into the house.  How, I can’t even fathom to tell you.  But they do.

Now, we do have mouse catchers in the form of Calie and Thor, who have performed their duties wonderfully to date.  Unfortunately, they seem to have met their match with a certain rodent that has been driving them batty for the past couple weeks.

And apparently this little creature has a penchant for Wild Rice, because it has been trying to gnaw through one of my Tupperware bowls trying to get at the tasty morsels.  When I saw that, I decided to take action.

I procured a live trap from the Extension Department at work and went about setting my plan in motion.  Now, I won’t use poison for 2 reasons:  1)  We have cats and I’d hate for them to ingest any of it; and 2) I fear the domino effect, which is mouse is poisoned and dies, mouse gets eaten by bird and bird dies, bird falls from the sky through the windshield of car and causes an accident.  Sorry, I just couldn’t live with myself if that happened, so I choose the catch and release method.  I sleep better at night.

So last night I set my trap, and for bait I used… what else:  Wild Rice!

Not my mouse... he was too quick!