Late Night Visitors

Yep, it's winter.

It's cold outside and some outsiders have decided to make their presence known to me in the past few nights.

At around 2:30 am Saturday morning I heard quite a bit of noise coming from behind the stove as I burned the midnight oil working on the computer so I turned up the lights. What did I see? Two little eyes staring out from one of the gas burners. What was he doing? He was stealing one of the chicken nuggets I had cooked for the kids and then neglected to clean up.

The thing that impressed me the most was the fact that the mouse in my stove was no bigger than the nugget but he managed to move it off the pan, onto the cooktop, and then across the griddle and into the drip tray beneath my burner. He ran several loops around the drip tray trying to push that nugget into the inside of the oven and eventually succeeded.

I sat here at my computer and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Sure it's gross having a mouse walking all over the surfaces where I make the food that I feed my family but this little guy had some real spirit to take that massive bit of food.

Now, I've got a baby in the house and she's crawling so anything that leaves potentially deadly doo-doo on the floor has to be removed. That meant setting a few traps as I will not allow poison in my house. It's not metabolized by the mouse and, since I throw the bodies outside to feed local scavengers and predatory birds, I don't want those poisons getting into the ecosystem. Trapping is immediate and harmless to those who would use the mice as food.

The thing is, if you see one, you've got more than one.

I've pulled three from that same burner in the past 24 hours.

I did this at the other house and ended up with an owl in the tree just behind the house. I know the mice will be consumed and not wasted and they'll provide some much-needed calories for the animals that would've preyed on the old and sickly deer in the woods that are no longer back there.

Thanks for reading,


B