These past few weeks have seen a drastic revaluation of the battle lines in the war on mice, spurred by a trip to the tip with a load of weeds. The weeding was a subset of a wider garden landscaping operation, which has been taking substantially longer to complete than originally intended. Kevin McLeod would be chiding me for having unrealistic expectations and not enough of a contingency budget, but that's another story.
All that is relevant to the war non mice is that a substantial pile of weeds has been gently composting on the bare earth of our courtyard for about two months. The pile was always destined for the tip, but hadn't made it there for a variety of reasons - not the least of which being that I could not be bothered.
Little did I know that I was already paying for my laziness.
When I finally got around to removing the pile, I received a nasty shock - the mice had made themselves a mouse home under the warmth of the decomposing weeds. And it wasn't just made out of the organic matter of the weeds - they had been constructing earth works. There were several channels and even a little tunnel dug into the ground!
I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before (but I will surely mention it again), but the soil in our garden is a heavy clay which dries rock hard, but forms a sticky thick mud when saturated. The fact that the mice had managed to burrow into it was pretty impressive.
I only saw one mouse scatter when I deconstructed the nest, but I haven't had a mouse inside the house since. The bait on the traps hasn't even been nibbled. Three weeks without any mousey encounters is the longest we've gone since the war on mice began. I've done some reading that suggests mice only wander in about a 10 m radius of their nest.
I'm hopeful the elimination of the nest has solved my mouse problem, at least for this season. Next year I'm going to focus not only on the entry points to the house and trapping any that come into the house, but also on looking through the garden for nests.
All that is relevant to the war non mice is that a substantial pile of weeds has been gently composting on the bare earth of our courtyard for about two months. The pile was always destined for the tip, but hadn't made it there for a variety of reasons - not the least of which being that I could not be bothered.
Little did I know that I was already paying for my laziness.
When I finally got around to removing the pile, I received a nasty shock - the mice had made themselves a mouse home under the warmth of the decomposing weeds. And it wasn't just made out of the organic matter of the weeds - they had been constructing earth works. There were several channels and even a little tunnel dug into the ground!
I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before (but I will surely mention it again), but the soil in our garden is a heavy clay which dries rock hard, but forms a sticky thick mud when saturated. The fact that the mice had managed to burrow into it was pretty impressive.
I only saw one mouse scatter when I deconstructed the nest, but I haven't had a mouse inside the house since. The bait on the traps hasn't even been nibbled. Three weeks without any mousey encounters is the longest we've gone since the war on mice began. I've done some reading that suggests mice only wander in about a 10 m radius of their nest.
I'm hopeful the elimination of the nest has solved my mouse problem, at least for this season. Next year I'm going to focus not only on the entry points to the house and trapping any that come into the house, but also on looking through the garden for nests.
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