Country Mouse

Out here in the sticks, little lodgers are part of life: usually field mice. They usually fall for the old trick of heading for the peanut butter and apple wedged into the humane trap, and that’s it. They are indeed trapped, and next morning we’ll take them a long way down the road and invite them to make a new home elsewhere. I guess it’s not really all that kind or humane at all, but a traditional trap with certain death at the end seems even less appealing.

This image is blurry, because Country Mouse is trapped behind the orangey plastic wall of the trap.

#Kinda Square

Author: margaret21

I'm retired and living in North Yorkshire, where I walk as often as I can, write, volunteer, and travel as often as I can.

49 thoughts on “Country Mouse”

  1. You’re like my son, he is carrying the mice he traps on his wooden terrace of his 3rd floor appartment for miles out in the wild where he places them in their ‘natural environment’. He is feeling sorry for them to have been living in a human abode!!!!

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      1. Well, not with my son, living in a house from the 18th century and on the 3rd floor. i suspect he also doesn’t want them to feast in his newly laid communal garden which is only about a quarter mile from his home…. 😉

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  11. Now that is what I call an excellent photo of a mouse….because I can’t see it! I wonder if I lived in the country would I learn to love them instead of the opposite?

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  12. It will be tough out there in the land of Mother Nature, but at least the mouse will have a fighting chance, probably better too than in a less rural spot overflowing with cats.

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  13. I always thought that was kinder as well but I have been severely reprimanded by a biologist friend. Since mice are, he says, communal animals one condemns them to stress and almost certain death. Now I am bewildered and I don’t know what to do.

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  16. Yes, it’s quite a job deciding where to take them too. Those in Spain went a kilometres away to near the village, well it was a house mouse! The ones in London went to the country estate of Osterley Park. Nowhere near the house, honest! That one was quite an invasion.

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  17. It can be a dilemma and I agree about not poisoning or killing. Humane suggestions I have seen include making one’s dwelling unattractive to rodents (e.g. food is inaccessible) and close off access points into the building where possible. If an animal comes into the house, humane trap it and release it within 100 yards. You might be interested in this link to advice from PETA.
    https://www.peta.org/issues/wildlife/living-harmony-wildlife/house-mice/#:~:text=Captured%20mice%20and%20rats%20can,at%20a%20local%20animal%20shelter.)

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    1. Thank you for that. I learned a lot. We hadn’t been checking the trap hourly, for a start. In a very old building like this, making the property un-enterable is probably a lost cause, but we’ll see what we can do to make it less attractive. It was a shock to realise they’d been partying in the always food free study – only that errant apple gave them away!

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      1. For many buildings making it un-enterable is likely to be difficult if not impossible I should think. We do sometimes hear critters moving around above the ceiling in one of the rooms in our house. The latest visitor rather surprisingly turned out to be a southern tree agama. Surprising because there are also several (non-venomous) eastern green snakes around, and we sometimes see a snake taking a rest under the eaves.

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  18. It took us ages to figure out where all those peanut shells had come from … a mouse had chewed through the brick grating in our back room and made itself a nest behind it, and was helping itself to the bag of peanuts for the birds! Chris needs to get hold of a humane trap from work and we’ll try rehousing it. My worry is, what if it has lots of friends or a little family? How will we ever know if we’ve got them all?

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