Friday, January 23, 2009

Mouse Trap

It’s no secret that my house here in Managua is slightly full of insects and critters. I’ve mentioned many of them already – the lizard, the giant bugs, and the horse next door (which does not, technically, qualify as being in the house). However, there is one house guest (or, as it were, group of house guests) that I haven’t talked about much – the mice.

I was aware from the first day that we might be dealing with some little ratones here and there. Shortly before I’d arrived, our cupboard where we keep all the dishes and dry groceries had to be cleaned out because some mice had gotten into it. We’re now extra careful to keep the doors shut.

I don’t think I realized the full extent of the problem, though, until after living in the house for a couple weeks. Not a night goes by that we don’t have a mouse sighting. They’re very quick – you’ll basically just see something darting across the floor out of the corner of your eye. One night, a mouse came jumping into the house through the window (the window isn’t extremely high, but it was still pretty amazing). Finally, much to my dismay, I was informed yesterday that Joe and Kelly saw another little rodent heading into…my bedroom.

These are no ordinary mice – they chew through anything (including, it appears, concrete) and they’ve licked countless mousetraps clean without being caught. As a result, the mouse hunt is being stepped up to new levels. However, Joe seems to be set on finding both a creative solution, and one that doesn’t necessarily kill the mice (?!), so we’ve had an entertaining few days watching him construct a mouse boobie trap. Sadly, the latest news this morning was that they had once again stolen the cheese and avoided the trap.

Joe and Kelly have tried a lot of things in the past, but the cat ran away, the traps don’t work, and we’re afraid to use poison because we don’t want to be finding dead mice all over the house. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

2 comments:

  1. Have you tried the homemade mouse trap using a plastic 2 liter soda bottle? I have seen the "how to" video on YouTube and am considering constructing one of these myself.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd go with Kurth's plan. Otherwise, I'm shipping down my cat.

    ReplyDelete

 

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