Mice and Rats and…..

Probably the only thing I miss about Evil Kitty roaming the neighborhood is the way he kept the rodent population in check.  He was doing a better job at it than I realized.  He disappeared last winter, and this summer the mouse population skyrocketed.  

A couple weeks ago I started putting out traps in sheltered spots near the obvious mouse holes around the exterior of the house, as well as near the corners where we’d heard mice.

Almost immediately started catching mice.  Had to swap out several of the cheap wood snap traps for some of the sturdier plastic ones as the wood ones didn’t handle the wet well, but pretty  much every trap was catching at least one mouse a day.  We were having a few empty triggered traps, but not a lot.

Then I couldn’t find one of the traps…..finally found it a solid 10ft away from where I’d placed it.  It contained a mouse head.  No body, just the head inside the trap.  

Then I started getting ALOT of empty triggered traps.  And then traps started disappearing….

I set up the trail camera to watch the spot where a couple of the traps are and caught this:

Yah, your guess is as good as mine.  Current running vote is raccoon.

Then Thursday Arty suddenly went berserk at one of the windows.  I figured squirrel, but looked out the window to check…..thats a funny looking squir….THATS A RAT DAMMIT!  And its FRICKING HUGE!!  Something tells me that explains the empty triggered traps, and maybe even the missing traps (though it still doesn’t explain the bodyless head in the one trap).

*sigh*

Started looking at rat traps.  I’ll be picking up some huge snap traps this week.  But I’m also looking at some of the electric zapper traps, since they’ll absolutely kill anything that gets into them, and is marginally less likely to snap on a dog paw when I’m not fast enough to keep them away from a trap…..