Apparently I have a new mortal enemy..
Surprisingly it is something so tiny I could easily hold it in one hand, if I could catch it.
In the garden you can just see in the picture above, the thing full of weeds.. since we moved in here we heard rustling in that garden. Seeing as it was summer at the time we assumed it was lizards. We assumed wrong.
On Saturday morning I was getting ready to do the gardening – more on that in a future post. I saw the little black and white cat from next door sitting on the fence next to the garden looking intently into the garden. I went out and chased the kitty away because I don’t want them roaming here now we have the chickens.
When I got in there to pull out the weeds last Saturday, out of the corner of my eye I saw something brown run across the concrete into the shed. It stopped just inside the door and I could clearly see it was a MOUSE. Oh noes!
My general philosophy with animals is live and let live. I have never been involved with trapping and killing animals in my lifetime. The Other Half on the other hand, is a farm boy. He apparently used to trap mice in his sleep or something. So when I told him about the mouse, he tells me that now that I have chickens mice are my mortal enemy. Mice will attract snakes as well!
I saw the mouse again that afternoon, at least I assumed it was the same one. It was running back to the garden but when it found out I was still in there, it went back to the shed. I also found some small lizards.
The Other Half came home with 6 traps for mice, ones that kill the mice very quickly so they do not suffer. I would be very unhappy if they did suffer.
We have a huge oval next door to the house and the people who live out the back are elderly and have very overgrown gardens. I sincerely doubt we’ll ever be without mice given these conditions. But they had made themselves a very nice nest in our garden which I found when I was pulling out the weeds made from dryer fluff, paper, small bits of wood like woodchips but they came from our coop building efforts, and chewed off bits of some other recycling items which were in the garage, cardboard and others.
The dryer fluff indicates to me that either these mice have been inside the house collecting it or they somehow found a way into our rubbish bins because that is where the dryer fluff goes. It has never gone out into the shed.
The laundry has a door to the outside and it also has a door to the inside which is *always* closed and the cats never get to go in there unless they sneak in when I am bringing groceries in. I always bring them in the first door and then close it, and then open the inner door so the cats can’t get out. So now that explains why the cats seem to do a lot of sniffing the floor in there.
We set up the traps with cheese on Saturday night. We have since caught 4 mice.