pyesetz | More dead-vermin photography (Reply)

Lawyers: Nothing.

Stock market: Nothing. Still waiting for Rome to start burning.

House: Recently I saw a mouse in my basement, for the first time in years. Usually my basement gets shrews. Shrews are smaller but have venom glands while mice don’t, so shrews generally win territory-fights with mice. Most shrew species don’t climb, so the shrews stay on my basement floor while the mice prefer my kitchen.

Here is the route that I saw the mouse take. It entered the house next to the laundry exhaust duct, travelled along the top of the stone foundation (which is mortared to a 45° angle to make it hard to walk on). The varmint then scampered down to the window-blind roller that has no blind at the moment, then jumped up to the next segment of foundation, then entered the interior wallspace next to the kitchen sink’s drainpipe.

They say you should put the mousetrap where you see the mouse, but there are no level spots along this track! So I put the trap where I usually do, on the floor, baited with chocolate as usual. I caught a shrew! I haven’t been having a problem with them recently. They’ve been staying out of sight, eating my basement invertebrates. It’s too bad that I killed one needlessly. There was no way the animal I caught, with its black fur and (in death) legs perpendicular to its body, could possibly have been the animal I saw scampering along the foundation, which on one of its trips noticed that I was staring at it and instantly reversed direction. (Shrews have poor vision and it takes them several seconds to realize that I am looking at them and I am a gigantic predator, so they are now in big trouble. Mice respond in an instant.)

So I tried again. This time I put the trap in the basement walkout room, just under the laundry exhaust duct, baited with peanut butter. I caught a mouse! It seems smaller than the mouse I originally saw, but this dead-mouse-in-a-trap near the entrance might well be enough to scare off the rest of its family from living in my house.

I placed the trap with its trigger under the left edge of the opening for the laundry duct. It looks like the animal was leaving the house and set off the trap with a back leg. Clearly the spring threw the mouse quite far. My guess is that the mouse’s head got slammed onto the whitewash-covered stone and that red spot is actually blood and brains.

Here is another picture, showing just how thick and red that spot was. Sorry for the poor photography. This picture was taken Saturday morning, when the red spot was probably only a few hours old. It has since evaporated or soaked in and is now a flat pink stain.

Next question: what attracted the mouse’s attention? I don’t think they’ve come in this way before. The answer was obvious: there was a bag of garbage in the walkout that I’d been keeping there for several weeks. You see, my regional government limits me to 3 bags of garbage every two weeks and sometimes I have 4 bags followed by several weeks of 3 bags so I can never get rid of that fourth bag! And this happened to me just *after* their “double-garbage weeks” for Christmas and New Year’s. So, um, yeah, there was a mouse-hole chewed into the bottom of the bag.

I have successfully used the walkout before as a garbage-storage area (especially in winter), but clearly it is risky. I was already aware that the external door of the walkout (which is at least 80 years old and in poor shape) does not do a good job of keeping out rain and snow — or bumblebees — and now mice. I suppose I could try one of those tags-for-extra-bags that they gave me when this collection régime began, but I haven’t been using them because when the free ones run out, I’m supposed to buy more.

I have a spare garbage barrel with lid that I’ve been keeping on my rear deck. Barrels with lids get destroyed when put out on garbage day, but they are more suitable for these extended retentions. So I moved the bag-with-mousehole to the barrel and now my walkout is garbage-free!

Relevant prior posts:

2008 Aug 23: Dead-shrew photos. First-ever comment from frith!
2014 May 11: Mentions the shrew breeding area next to the basement walkout. Nobody has called me a werewolf in years.