Mice 101

It’s Back to School time.. and in the spirit of preparedness I want to quickly share with you what I have learned during an impromptu course recently taken :
Entertaining Mice 101
How to host a mouse party:
1) Cut down and otherwise remove a third of all the plants and shrubbery in your yard. This displaces the mice from their homes and allows them to consider your home as a place to apply for citizenship.
2) Forget about the two bags of brown sugar, the package of marshmallows, and pound of rice that you failed to put in more secure containers .. Set cases of salsa and jam in front of these items so you don’t notice them for several months.
3) Go on vacation for 10 days.
How to prevent a mouse party:
1) Write 100 times: Disturbing mouse habitats can be harmful to your food storage.
2) Can or bottle all food storage items ASAP. Do not forget about items purchased in plastic bags or put off storing them properly.
3) Don’t count on plastic lids, plastic storage bins or Mylar bags to spare you from a mouse party. We had sugar in a gallon glass jar with a hard plastic lid.. which the mice ate through. Glass jar good,…. plastic lid, bad!
4) Once you reach a tally of 20 mice you might want to call an exterminator.. Bigger and Better mouse traps do exist.!!!!…. Ours answered all our mouse questions, walked around the entire inside and outside of the house pointing out entry points and told us exactly what to do to prevent more parties.
5) One of the easiest places for mice to get in is where you siding meets the foundation of your home. Cover these opening with furring strips and caulk the seams. We’re stuffing steel wool in the openings before we do that. Air conditioning vents and where the garage meets your house are two other popular entrance sights. Our exterminator recommended furring and caulk around the floor of the garage once again.
What to do while you wait for exterminators to show up.
We’re told this is a busy time of year for exterminators. Evidently skunks, hornets, mice and other such pests celebrate the end of summer with massive invasions. Whatever the reason, (and let me tell you we heard some doozies of excuses) the first two exterminators we contacted literally stood us up!!!! As in “no show, no contact” until hours after the appointments.. etc. Trust me…. a 48 hour delay in assistance when Mickey and his friends are doing the Limbo and have an open karaoke mike set up in your basement can be traumatic. That’s the word our third exterminator used.. “traumatic”.. when he promptly returned our call and came out at the end of his long work day. (Happy to give references upon request here) SO:
1) Call more than one exterminator when you first realize you have a problem
2) Find out if your dog is a mouser.. Happily, ours is.. much to our delight and sometimes to our terror
3) If you don’t have a cat, beg, steal or borrow a neighbor’s
4) Move everything you can in the infested area away from the foundation or any suspected areas where mice could be entering.. ( you’ll know they’re entering by tell tale signs of little black dots!)
5) Always wear shoes. (another story for another day)