Keeping mice warm

From time to time we get mice in the house. If the sight of their droppings bothers us enough, we set traps. Not those cruel spring-loaded things, of course: these are plastic boxes with little doors. You put cheese or something in there at the far end and set it down carefully with the door open. Then (1) mouse smells bait, (2) mouse walks into box, (3) box tips slightly with added weight, (4) door swings shut. All you have to do then is pick it up and take it outside and let the thing go. Well, maybe you don't want to just take it out to the yard -- it would probably come right back in. Well, maybe you don't want to just put it next to the neighbors' house, either: not fair to make the mouse move into their house instead. So you take it to a little patch of woods at the end of the street. Your child might be a little troubled by the thought that the mousie is so far away that it might never see its family again. You might even be a little troubled by the same thought, but you stifle it.

The first time I ever did this, I had an embarrassing false alarm: got all the way to the patch of woods before I figured out that there was nothing in the box. It had been sprung somehow without catching anybody, and I had jumped to a conclusion. Well, I didn't want to open it before I got there! It could have jumped out!

One time we caught a mouse in winter. The way the snow was falling that night, we couldn't see turning it out of the house: it must be so hard digging yourself a burrow when the ground is frozen and you're shivering. We improvised a temporary cage and reset the trap. A few hours later we had three of them in captivity and the weather was not letting up. So we borrowed a proper cage from some neighbors who no longer had gerbils or hamsters, put our three temporary pets in it and waited for a thaw.

Rhymes of the Times

People talk about moon/June as an overused rhyme in songs. I don't actually know any examples, but I would guess that the late 40s and 50s could be called the moon/June era. I like the idea that other eras could be named similarly. There was a schemes/dreams era around the Great Depression. There was a self/else era beginning in the late 60s. Maybe between moon/June and self/else there was a love/of era.

Comments? Criticisms? Examples? Elaborations?

Part 4: Peppermint oil

It turned out that I had not been quite careful enough not to imprison anybody. Desperate scrabbling sounds were heard. Back up the stepladder. Off with the panel, ducking my head.

It would have been nice if, as soon as I opened up again, the desperate scrabbling had turned into a desperate bid for freedom; even clawmarks on my scalp would have been a small price to pay, I think, for knowing we were done. But no action. I could see a squirrel cowering in what I called the "back room". Or rather I could see part of it. It was behind a sort of roof rafter and I don't think it knew that its tail was showing.

Common sense said that it was more likely to come out and let me finish if it was not being watched. On the other hand, I had to keep an eye on things if I wanted to avoid closing up prematurely again. I kept my distance and tried to be watchful but non-threatening.

At one point, losing patience, I got back up there and reached in with a stick to tickle the tail, thinking maybe I could scare it into fleeing. Of course this just caused it to pull the tail up and out of sight, making it even harder to keep an eye on things.

We began to consider ways of driving it out. My wife remembered a little vial of peppermint oil that a neighbor had given us once as a mouse repellent. A rodent is a rodent, right? I impregnated a fairly large number of paper towels with the stuff, put them in the squirrel house, and waited some more. No action. I put the panel back in place to keep the fumes from dissipating. At this point you could smell peppermint in the second-floor bathroom. Now what?

Part 3: Insulation

We weren't sure how to proceed. My wife's idea seemed to be that someone would have to get up on a ladder with some sort of power saw and cut his way in, wearing protective headgear -- maybe a bicycle helmet -- to protect himself from toenails when panicked squirrels came racing out. (She is by nature a worrier, and a planner for worst cases, although you might not guess that from the osprey story.) I was imagining something a little different, a hammer instead of a saw, prying things apart with the claw, but it was still going to be violence to the house and it was not very clear in my mind. We were both daunted. In the end she asked for help from a friend (a different one) who also knows something about houses. He took one look and pointed out the right way to get in there. There were several clearly visible screw heads; undo them and the front panel would come right off. Duh.

This friend then got up on a stepladder, took the panel off, pulled out armfuls of vegetable matter that the squirrels had been using for insulation -- he filled a fairly large trash barrel -- and closed it up again. He was pretty sure there were no squirrels in there. He nailed a piece of scrap wood into place to close up the chink between panel and stucco that they had been using to get in and out. We thanked him and he went away.

Within an hour or so, squirrels had chewed through that thin piece of wood and were busily reinsulating, repeatedly running in with mouthfuls of leaves and pine needles and out again to get more. I admired their industry, but it made me tired to think of all the wasted effort on their part and ours.

Then it was my turn to get up on the ladder. I took off the panel and pulled out all the leaves that I could reach. I was actually a bit more thorough about that than the other guy had been. This was in effect a two-room squirrel house, with the further "room" being hard to reach and hard to see into, but I did my best. And somewhere back there I found a piece of wood which was clearly the bit had originally filled that chink, which settled the question of what I would use to close up. It was sturdier and a perfect fit and it just needed some screws or nails.

I was as careful as I could be about not leaving the site unattended during this operation, so that again I could be reasonably sure that when I did close it up I was not imprisoning anybody.

Part 2: Stains on the stucco

Over the next, oh, I don't know how many months, it became harder and harder to ignore the fact that one or more squirrels were living in that enclosed space. (I was sorry to think that we might not have given them enough time to get their babies to safety up there, if that was the case, but it had been hard to just leave the helpless things on the ground given the danger of a cat or a dog coming around.) A bit of broken woodwork afforded a visible opening to it, and from time to time we would hear them running up and down the stucco wall that led to it from the ground. Sometimes they even used the first-floor half-bathroom window in that wall to get a toehold as they raced up, so that a peaceful sit could be interrupted by a very surprising clattering.

What finally moved us to action was two things: One, some strongly colored brownish liquid was making its way down that nice cream-colored wall in greater and greater quantities; presumably rain was getting into the top of that inhabited space and dripping out the side or bottom after becoming infused with -- what? pee and poop? pee and poop and something from the nesting material? Two, a trusted advisor of ours, a friend who is in the construction business (and has in fact done some major work on this house) told us that we were asking for big trouble. He pointed out that if the squirrels were to find their way into the walls of the house and from there to, for example, the attic, and to start chewing on things electrical, then we could find the house burning down some day. But we forgot to ask him how to get in there.

The other squirrel story, Part 1: Saving the babies

One day two baby squirrels appeared at our doorstep. They were too young to run or climb to safety. One of them was a more competent crawler than the other, but they both looked like goners. It seemed that they had fallen from a nest. We didn't see a nest, although we had a hunch that there was one in an enclosed part of the house right above the door -- unconnected with the inside, a sort of leftover space under an added-on rooflet. We didn't detect any parent squirrels trying to deal with the situation, so after some hours of this my wife collected the poor things in a box and dealt with it herself. She somehow managed to locate someone not too many miles away who has built an excellent rehab center and rest home in his back yard for injured and orphaned squirrels and was happy to take on two more cases.

Catch and release

One day we arrived at that same little country house to find something big flying around in the screened porch -- a fully grown osprey. It had entered through one of the window screens, probably blundering into the screen headfirst and suddenly finding itself more indoors than outdoors. The poor worried thing would cling to a screen with its mighty talons, flap its mighty wings a couple of times to cross the room to another window, and repeat, sometimes resting, never for long, hoping for a way out.

We could have just opened the exterior door, gone away, and waited. Instead, my wife took matters in hand, drawing on skills acquired in childhood when she used to assist a charming old gentleman in banding (much smaller) birds. She slowly approached the osprey, holding a large outstretched towel before her in a soothing manner. Then she deftly wrapped the bird up from behind and held it firmly but gently as she carried it outdoors, where she opened the towel and let it fly away.

In hindsight we both thought she had taken a crazy chance and was lucky not have been seriously cut up by claws or beak at the moment of release.

Saving a Squirrel

In our family's country house is a wood-burning stove. Opening it once after some months' absence, I found the corpses of two grey squirrels inside. We assumed that they had entered by the chimney, been unable to get out the same way, and starved to death. As we removed the dead squirrels we became aware that there was also a live one lurking in the flue. To save it from the same fate, we baited a Have-A-Heart trap on the hearth, opened the stove door, sealed off the immediate area with heavy plastic sheeting, and left the house.

The damn squirrel came out when all was quiet, ignored the yummy peanut butter in the trap, tore through the plastic, ran all around the house knocking breakable things off shelves, ate up all the toothpaste it could find, and generally made itself at home. When a human entered the house to check the trap (ha!), the thing exploded out of the kitchen garbage pail and raced back into the stove.

Later, when somebody with a little more sense tried annoying the animal with some smoke, it just ran away up the chimney and never came back. We never knew how the other two died.