After living for almost 3 years in an old church (old, as in, like 4x older than the US constitution) with an ill-fitting door that opens right into the mountains, I finally got my first mouse visit.
Sorry, that might be a run-on sentence.
Anyway at first I was thinking maybe they eat bugs so maybe if he just stays in his lane we can hang out. But nope, he had to make it weird. He started darting around and loudly rifling through plastics. Plus he was probably farting but I just couldn’t hear it.
Plus there’s the diseases he’s wiping all over my stuff, and the awkward jumpin out of the garbage. So he had to go.
I’ll spare you the long-version and just show you the pics of my traps, telling you I got’im.
As I type this he’s stuck in a bucket covered with a cardboard thing under bottle of beans and a bottle of baking soda. Antonella gave me the beans and I don’t know why I have a bottle of baking soda.
Isn’t baking soda supposed to be really useful? (I’ll say! It’s keeping the mouse from escaping.)
Maybe I’ll type more later dunno
Let’s see how that publishes online ok
If you are here to see how to make this trap that worked but can’t read the photo:
- Both traps caught the mouse, he just jumped out of the first one because the bucket wasn’t tall enough, and the ‘trap door’ left a gap at the edge large enough for the very springy mouse to jump and claw out of.
- One detail not in the photo of the first trap: around the inside of the bucket, about 5 inches below the rim, I smeared pastry cream from a sweet-roll – to be just out of the mouse’s reach.
- You can find this on YouTube easy
- The final version just replaced the trap door with a baited toilet-paper roll hanging over the edge of a central hole cut out of rigid cardboard. The central hole was to eliminate the gap at the edge, making it more difficult to jump out. The creamy-chocolate bait was placed inside at the roll’s overhanging edge to draw the mouse into tipping the roll down into the bucket.
- The mouse was still trying to jump out but I covered the central hole with another piece of cardboard then added weight on top so it couldn’t push past the cardboard-only closed top. The scrappy little guy could have probably figured out how to exit if I hadn’t heard him drop in and closed it off. The bucket is pretty shallow.
That’s it. Bye. I’ll make an Italian-countryside-phenomena calendar soon … then maybe I’ll start in on some story time for context … and yah I’ll have to really draw not jus