Never had this before and it’s getting a little out of hand in my opinion.
I should preface this with the fact that I keep the house clean. No food left out, or rotting, wash my dishes every evening, vacuum, dust…etc…
So, a few months ago I noticed mouse droppings in the cabnet under the sink and in the drawer with the utensils. I keep the trash bucket thing under the sink so I can kinda see how one mouse managed to get lucky and find its way to the trash. But for the life of me I don’t understand why I also found mouse droppings in the utensil drawer which is not close to the sink and not on the same level.
I bought this Decon mouse poison. Put one under the sink and one in the utensil drawer. In the meantime I completely cleaned out that drawer and washed everything first like regular then in the dishwasher with sanitizer option. After a few days I found one dead mouse in the trash! Awesome! Left everything as it was for another week and nothing changed. The poison didn’t get more eaten and there was no more poop. I put everything back and decided to keep the poison under the sink just in case for a while longer.
Everything was fine until 3 weeks ago when I found mouse droppings in the utensil drawer again. But not under the sink. Once again I nuked all the utensils and put the Decon poison in there. NOTHING! No poop, no bites taken out of the poison… NOTHING. After a week and half I put everything back. All was good until this evening when I again found droppings in the utensil drawer. The utensils are getting nuked in the washer and I put poison back in the drawer. There is nothing under the sink and all the plumbing holes under the sink have been caulked/filled and have no holes in them.
At this point I’m lost as to what to do next. The mouse doesn’t seem to come back to the same spot. Or at least it doesn’t touch the poison and doesn’t leave poop. Can it be its not attracted to that poison?
One other thing. I checked the rest of the kitchen and found nothing.i cannot pull the drawers out to see it there are any holes in the wall to block
We live way out in the middle of the woods - we get mice all the time. It really doesnt have anything to do with being a messy person in my experience, our house is kept very clean…but this time of year specifically they’re looking for a warm place to live out the winter and they can really squeeze into the tiniest cracks/crevices or come right in through my garage doors when they’re open, etc.
I never cared for poison because if they eat it and die you’ll likely never find them and they’ll just rot away in a wall somewhere. I just keep a few traps spread around my house year-round with some peanut butter, that seems to get them. One of our cats is quite the killer too so he snags one now and again.
I wouldnt sweat it too much, grab a few cheap mouse traps, bait them with peanut butter and just check them regularly. If theres a mouse he’ll seek out that peanut butter and you’ll get him easy enough. It’s not really rocket science.
I don’t really care if it dies between the walls. How much can one of those really smell?
What’s under the sink is sealed with that expanding yellow foam but that’s the only place I can get to and should be the only place where anything is coming from the wall. But regardless I can’t pull the drawers out to see. Or I just haven’t figured out how they come out.
So with mouse traps. Would using bait invite more mice? Possibly having a never ending chain of mice showing up? Or am I over thinking this?
To make the trap more effective, tie a thin strip of cotton…t-shirt, underwear, similar on to the trigger and mash the peanut butter in to it. The mouse has to tug the strip to get the peanut butter instead of licking it off.
I’ve used those traditional style wood spring loaded traps with great effectiveness, rodents like to run alongside walls or edges, so set the traps up in those areas with a little bit of cheese for a bait. Forget the new fangled plastic traps, the old style wood and metal ones work great.
The thing is, if you have mice then you have more mice than you realize. This time of year, they are moving in seeking warmth and food- if you can get rid of what you have, chances are you’ll be free of them for the rest of the winter.
I’ve had great success with traditional traps and fresh peanut butter (they seem to ignore the stale).
A dead mouse in a wall or crawlspace will smell pretty bad for up to a couple of weeks as it decomposes.
Also, cats can be very effective if they still have their claws
The bucket trap works if you want to decimate them on an industrial scale. 5-gal bucket (kitty litter type. But then you have cats. OK, that doesn’t mean you don’t have mice). 3-4" of water. A string across the mouth of the bucket with a pop can, the string goes through the top and bottom so it rolls on the string. Peanut butter on the can, a 3’ board for an “on ramp”. The get to the top of ramp, have mouth-watering rapture at the sight and smell of the peanut butter, and jump to the can. It rolls, small splash, help, help, next! I thought it was a joke-- it ain’t!
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So far there’s only been evidence in those two places. Under the sink, which still has two poison containers and no evidence of mice any more. The poison isn’t getting less and no droppings.
And in the utensil drawer which only has forks, knives, spoons…etc… no food. They don’t show up when the utensils are out because the poison isn’t touched and there is no poop to suggest they were there. Once the clean metal utensils are placed back the mice show up within a week or two!
Saturday I might take a serious second look at the drawers and how to take them out
First rule of mouse in the house is make sure you control where you kill it.
They can get inside from outside, they need only the smallest gap in siding or roof awning. Once in the walls they can go all over your house, cabinets are like habitat trails to mice.
Strongly consider a live trap and in my experience peanut butter is probably the best bait. They smell it from a long way off and love it. Put a live trap under the sink, catch it and remove it at least a couple miles away.
One was already killed back a few months ago when this originally started. Another one showed up a few weeks ago. Didn’t seem like it ate any poison bait but it disappeared when the forks and spoons were moved for about as long as they were moved. Came back within a week or so of that stuff being back in the drawer.
Lol I realize how that sounds. Maybe I got the retarded one! [emoji16]
They tend to run a long habit trail. Again the people telling you peanut butter is the move are dead on. You definitely want to get this guy before he finds your panty full of food. Their teeth are like razor blades and they can literally chew a hole right through a sheet of drywall. Be glad it’s mice, in south florida we had roof rats which ate through roof soffits and non metal vents and lived in your attic and once in were a huge PITA to get rid of. They also follow the scent of previous explorers so even if you get rid of one, more could show a week later.
The mouse or mice probably avoided the cutlery for a bit because they had been moved - mice don’t like things that change - once things went back to normal, they returned. And that’s why sometimes it takes some time for mice to go after a trap.
Mice are also not completely stupid: Odds are the second mouse or group of mice witnessed the first mouse eating the poison and dying - and learned from that experience.
ETA: Find places where you can set up and regularly monitor traps. That’s what I do. And try to keep my stuff places where mice cannot get to it.
When you do that, inspect the construction of the cabinets inside. I’ve seen them built where the drawer supports do not span top to bottom completely and had slightly less than inch gap between the counter-top and the vertical supports. When I found that, I took scrap wood and cut strips to fill up each gap, otherwise if a rodent gets into one part of the cabinet, it has the ability to get into every compartment in that bank of cabinets. With the gaps plugged up, it limits the places where the vermin can go to just one section. This makes them easier to stop and means less stuff to re-clean when evidence of an intrusion is found.
We also didn’t KNOW we had a mouse “problem,” until the wife got a Maine Coon cat. HE was the one that “discovered” them! :eek:
He got three, before the traps apparently got the rest. Maine Coons are pretty cool for a cat. VERY independent (NOT, ‘needy’ or ‘clingy’), and fantastic mousers. He still LOVES to patrol the basement, but hasn’t found any more for a couple of years now.