Well, we are still battling the mice - we can add one more confirmed kill to our numbers.
One of the risks of killing mice in your home is that some of these mice have little mice babies living within your walls. When you trap a mommy mouse, this leaves the babies to die where they live. This is our situation right now. Somewhere in our hallway walls, we have collateral damage. How do I know? Remember, I am achingly familiar with the smell of decomposition (read earlier posts to learn why if you are not already aware). When we walk from our kitchen into our hallway, we get a lovely whiff of some poor decaying creature. My best guess is that it is a baby mouse since some of our recent casualties have appeared to be nursing mouse mommies. Luckily when the decaying creature is that small, the odor dissipates rather quickly. I am not about to start tearing into my sheet rock to find the corpse.
Beside the mice invasion, we recently had another visitor. One night I was sitting in the living room watching TV and my big Australian Shepherd started a very loud, aggressive, fearful type of barking. He was in the kitchen and was most definitely focused on something on the floor. I walked into the kitchen to investigate and realized we had a visitor.
On the floor under the table was a young, very beautiful King Snake. It is never a calm feeling when you find a snake slithering across the interior of your home but at least I knew this little guy was not poisonous. Since my dog was barking, the snake was trying desperately to get away and wound up slithering into a storage bench. I yelled for my husband and he started to empty out the storage bench. There the snake was, all curled up trying to figure out just where the heck he had wound up (okay, I confess, I have no idea if it was a boy or girl but the name King Snake really lends itself to the assumption of boy). My other half ran and grabbed his thick leather work gloves and then stood somewhat frozen, staring down at the snake. I told him to remember to grab it behind the head and he responded, "I have a real aversion to reaching in and grabbing it." We decided to take another tact and I emptied out the kids play dough bucket. We truned the bucket upside down and trapped the snake. We slid a piece of thick paper under the snake and flipped the bucket. Here was our prize:
