And I have the task of trying to find oot where its comin in.
Skeedaddles behind the washing machine when I go out to the kitchen and put the light on. This has happened twice now ie same direction last night and just now. It ran from the fridge area and across the floor towards the back of the washing machine. Thing is I've blocked all escapes routes that I think it was running to but it still appears?
Enter the the IR lamp and camera. :-)
Mice can get through surprising small holes. If they can get their skull through (and they can dislocate the plates if needs be) the rest of their body is no trouble.
If a hole is big enough to take a standard ball point pen then a mouse can get through it. 3/8" dia is no bother.
Try UV light. Mice tend to wee almost at random, and their urine trails should be visible under UV light.
Regards,
The one that's currently living under our fridge was introduced via the catflap by a certain feline, whose days are numbered.
My cats used to bring them in every now and then. One poor little thing had lost all the skin and flesh from the last inch of its tail when I managed to pry it out of the cat's mouth but it recovered very nicely after a few days in a box with some food and water and some hay for bedding. The wound healed over leaving this skeletal length of just the bare bone behind and then that finally dropped off leaving him apparently none the worse.
It then repaid me by escaping, refusing to be caught and living under the kitchen units for several weeks where I continued to feed it while I tried to find a way of catching it and setting it free. What I didn't realise was it could get from the kitchen to the utility room via a hole where a water pipe ran through the wall and had been steadily munching its way at night through a dustbin bag of my old clothes, my best fishing net and various other things stored in there. Finally one day I went in to do a load of washing, heard a scrabble coming from inside an old motorcycle boot and managed to grab that and fold the top over before the little bugger could jump out. It wasn't until after I'd set him free that I found the carnage of chewed belongings he'd left behind.
I still did the same for the next one they brought in though.
Hi Steven
I'm using the IR lamp to capture on tape as to where its coming in ie totally dark in the kitchen. :-)
Our mouse dines on cat food while what passes for a cat is asleep with his legs in the air
Sucker.
Mice will do damage full stop. You've only found some of it. I wonder what state any wiring or pipe insulation it could get at is in? Possibly hidden in cavities or voids...
Most of the creatures our cat brings in (mainly voles and shrews, occasional young rabbit) are already dead. Anything alive enough to run away is normally re-caught in an hour and eaten by said cat[*]. The mortally wounded we have a dispatching stick for.
When the mice came in on their own when the weather got cold we would live trap 'em and release them at the bottom of the paddock. It wasn't until one had a distinctive cut to an ear that we realised that they where probably back in the house before we were! So we started deporting them to a fell top (several miles from any habitation) to take their chances with the birds of prey. They didn't come back from there.
[*] Only very young shrews are eaten, older ones apparently have a nasty taste from something in their skin. Voles and baby rabbits are eaten in their entirety, fur, bones the lot. Just occasionally a vole stomach is left.
For sure...and that will work if its entry point is in your camera's field of view....but if the wee beastie's getting in elsewhere...
If you're using a webcam there's a free program called Pryme that has lots of handy functions like motion detection.
Regards,
Get a mouse trap. Bait with chocolate spread.
Or some of those nasty sticky mouse traps.
Our cat brings them in. The rat bit me when I tried to catch it though. Needed a tetanus and antibiotics for a week.
Ah. I wondered about that. Our cats bring in mice, shrews and voles, but never eat the shrews. I had come to the conclusion it was something to do with the taste. However, tasting nasty doesn't seem to have conveyed an advantage on the shrews, as the cats still kill them. The mice get et - as do the voles, though they quite often can't eat a whole one :-/ We occasionally get the green and purple wobblybits left on the mat - I had put this down to the different dining habits of the two cats, one of whom will neck a mouse whole in 15 seconds, while the other eats in a more finnicky manner, from the outside in. I had considered collecting the wobbly bits to use in vole-au-vents.
Regards Richard
owners...there ya go dad I'm doing me work now feed me. :-)
I don't mind the dead ones. The ones which are half eaten are a bit gross but the live ones who bite are not welcome. I've thrown loads out in the past - but this last one was a good bit bigger and bit. It squealed. I squealed. It was horrid. The stray cat bite was worse though. But at least I didn't need another tetanus. I don't know which of the 3 cats invited this other one in. At least that wasn't a half eaten torso.
I regularly carried a mouse by the tail to sling it back out. One did manage to coil up and bite me -- two red blobs of blood appeared as though I'd put a staple in my finger. I didn't seem to catch anything from it though.
It's a long time since I read it, but ISTR Desmond Morris said they do it to show you what you should be doing, as you don't seem to be having any success catching and eating any yourself.
A couple of weeks ago, something caught my eye outside. It was next door's cat in my garden tossing a mouse high into the air over and over in an unsuccessful attempt to get it moving again. A little while later I looked out again, and the cat had got bored and gone, leaving the quite sizable mouse dead on the lawn. A magpie come down onto the fence at first, and then onto the lawn, hopped across, prodded the dead mouse, struggled to get it in its beak, and then flew off with it. I pondered on the irony of the cat feeding the bird...
Surely they're smaller than the whole ones?
Mary
You should always feed mice.
At the hardware shop you can buy special wooden trays for this, they have a spike for the food portions.
Mary
Doesn't it depend how big they start off at?
We found a gross kidney type thing last year - got a pic of it somewhere - just waiting to find one of those sites you can post pics to "things my cat didn't eat" :)
What do you mean by 'gross'?
In my lexicon it means large (as in 144).
Mary
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Mary Fisher" saying something like:
I had my last tetanus when a cat bit me!
Adam
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