Wednesday, June 09, 2004

The Mus musculus update

At around 1130pm last night Bert and I heard a noise in the kitchen. She and I have been a little jumpy of late, given our little visitors, so every random sound in the house -- the creaking of wood, the rustling of paper, the whoosh of a breeze in the windowpane -- gets us to prick our ears and scan the the room for any sign of the minute marauders. "Did your trap snap?" She asked. I had just that evening moved the snap trap from my bedroom out into the hallway. I emerged from my room and peered at it. The lever was still in place; nothing had triggered it. We heard some more noise from the kitchen and we approached slowly, switching on the light. And it stared out at us, with its beady little eyes all a-gleam, perched on top of Bert's sealed stackable bins from which she had earlier that afternoon removed foodstuffs. I squealed as it ran down the side of the bins and and darted into the corner of the pantry.

I am slightly embarrassed at how jumpy I am around the mice. Indeed, their moves are sudden and startling, and somewhere along the way I've managed to become socialised to the generically stereotypical female reaction of being squeamish around the critters. A far cry from when I was 10, and had no qualms catching spiders and grasshoppers with my bare hands, and had been used to seeing cockroaches as big as my pinky, rats the size of guinea pigs, and yellowish 4" lizards crawl all along the walls, nooks, and corners of the family residence when I lived in the Philippines. Bert and I reminisced, and my experiences with the random insects and varmints matched hers when she lived as a Dominican Republic Peace Corps volunteer some 4 years ago.

So I repositioned the traps again, and set down two of the snap traps in the kitchen by the pantry, close to where the little fucker vanished. The bottomline, 2 dead mice in each of the snap traps this morning. The sticky box traps do not appear to be working, and the poison blocks look like they've been nibbled at, and in one case, moved a pretty significant distance... we'll see what tonight brings...

posted by claudine |Added at 11:43 AM| | personal, mice