Murderous Melee

Wow, we have literally been exploding with mouse activity this week.  My husband and I have been laying in bed listening to the little buggers run through our ceiling as we try to sleep. The first night this happened we new the gantlet had once again been thrown down - it was time to jump into battle once more.

Last Friday we set a few traps and caught one mouse.  The little guy had made two appearances during our evening TV time - brazenly running under the couch where we were lounging.  We knew there many more based on the pitter patter of their little feet above our heads so we upped our game.  On Monday we set four traps around the kitchen and pantry.

One of our traps sitting on our kitchen counter - very hygienic.

 All I can say about that attempt is that the mice had a very nice midnight snack.  They literally licked the traps clean but did not trip the snapping mechanism.  My husband decided that we needed new traps so he stocked up on Wednesday night.  This is where we really got serious because each day we were seeing more and more droppings.  They were concentrated around the kitchen counters and the floor of the pantry. We both felt like we were being taunted. 

Thursday night no fewer than six traps were set.  This time we made a point of really smashing the cheese into the flaps - those little mousy tongues were not going to get passed us again.

Trap set in the pantry - the mice like our rice.  I need to improve food storage again.

Friday morning we woke to no one, not two, but three dead mice - hallelujah!!  Two were caught in the pantry and one was caught in the kitchen.  That made a total of four kills for the week but we weren't done yet.  As an aside, I was getting ready to wash my lunch box to take to work and I had left a small dinner roll in a plastic baggie in my lunch box.  One of our furry friends had scurried into my lunch box and eaten a hole through the plastic and enjoyed the stale roll.  Brazen bastard.

Friday night we set the traps again - all six.  Saturday morning we checked and another two had met their maker.  Both of these were once caught in the pantry.  The total had increased to six dead mice. After all of this carnage, we decided it was time to empty the pantry storage and do some pretty deep cleaning.  We needed to clean out the daily dose of mouse excrement as well as some bodily fluids left by the previous night's executions.  I try to use natural cleaners where I can but yesterday that panty got a very healthy dosing of bleach thanks to my husband.  This made me feel much better.

This morning, we looked at the set traps and rejoiced to see numbers seven and eight had experienced their last supper.  As most people are celebrating the resurrection, we are celebrating the demise of eight of God's creatures.

I didn't realize my husband had been throwing the mice all in the same location when he emptied the traps (see previous blog regarding my feelings on the trap-emptying).  As I took a little walk to inspect our new orchard today, I stumbled upon the burial ground.  Here is what I saw:

At least the vultures will be happy.

Tonight we will do it all again and hopefully the running feet will stop.  Victory will be ours!! 

The Death Toll rises to 18

Hippity Hoppity

I have written so much about the mice out here in the sticks and I have occasionally touched on some of the other animals we encounter on a regular basis.  Today I want to share one of my favorite groups of animals we get to play with.  It is winter so we aren't seeing these guys right now but during the spring, summer, and fall we get inundated with frogs and toads.

My daughter loves these particular animals.  She also loves lizards but we'll leave that for another day. 

These two were found in a hole when my daughter and mother were watering the potted plants.  They were curled up together and my daughter dragged them out to carry them the 100 yards to our house.  I opened the door and this is what I saw:

My little ragamuffin - I think she was as dirty as the toads.

She was able to find these two in the same hole on two other days.  They finally got tired of being ripped from their home and moved on to find a more peaceful abode.

On another day, we were tearing out some dead plants.  My son and daughter pulled up a dead lavender plant and found a very fat toad.  He was safely hiding amidst the roots.

Her hands are masking his fat belly but he measured about 5 inches across at his mid section.  We put him back in his hole and caught him one more time before he moved out.  My children have yet to catch on to the cause and effect nature of catching animals.  Kids catch, animal moves away. 

During the summer, we will drive home in the dark and it is toad/frog mania.  We have counted 15 toads jumping around the driveway and yard at one time. 

One night this guy hopped up to the wall of our house and was tying to escape behind a storage container. In my efforts to move him back toward the grass, I dropped him on top of the container. 

At this point, he peed all over the container.  Yes, my fumbling scared the piss out of him.  I really need to leave the animal handling up to my daughter.

Another night I went out to give the dogs water and found this handsome guy waiting for me:

I took a quick pic but afterward I felt a little bad. I am guessing their eyes are not used to such bright lights.  The next day I moved the water dish and there he was, safely hiding in the dirt underneath.  He became a fairly regular resident under the water dish but that is to be expected now that I blinded him.

Most of what we see are toads but occassionally we find tree frogs.  My kids had a blow up swimming pool at Grandma's house.  One day they found this guy taking a swim:

Over the summer months I think my daughter caught 3 or 4 of these guys.  You may have noticed I have said a lot about my daughter catching these guys.  My son gets very excited about the animals but is much more hesitant about touching them.  He leaves that up to his fearless older sister.  Isn't it great that she actually gets to catch these slippery slimy things?  How sad that so many kids never get to see these things out of a cage...

Spice of Life

Well Hello There!
It has been a LONG time since I was able to sit down and enjoy some blogging.  I started a new job in August and time is not something I have in excess.  That new development has not changed the battle on the home front and it is time to share our recent activities.  You will, of course, have to forgive me if my grammar skills continue to be problematic.  That also has not changed.

Once again the weather has turned chilly and the rains are on and off.  Well if I am being honest the rains are mostly off since we usually get single digit inches of rain each year but for us, its been wet.  When this cooling trend happens, animals of all sizes seek out warm places to hunker down.  Our summers are very warm (many days over 100 degrees F) so rodent activity largely happens outdoors.  Now is the time of the hunkering and a warm, well stocked house is very desirable.

Before I go into specifics about our recent victories, I must preface with the fact that the mice that have entered our home this year seem to be of a lower cognitive ability.  Now I realize the cognitive abilities of mice can be debated but I have been impressed with what these small furry creatures are able to accomplish.  As an example of this lower cognition trend, lets get into the details of our first kill of the season.

Spice of Life
Several weeks ago a lady at work was pulling out the final peppers and tomatoes out of her garden.  Due to a warm early fall, we had tomatoes all the way into late November.   This lady asked if I liked jalapenos and, as most self respecting native Californians would, I said I loved them. (Side note: if you don't understand Spanish pronunciation, the j is pronounced like an h, the e is pronounced like a long a sound, and n is pronounced like an ny sound or rather hall-uh-pay-nyo).  The next day she brought me a small basket of tomatoes and three jalapenos.

Over the weekend, I used one of the jalapenos and the tomatoes to make salsa.  My husband, also a native Californian, ate the other jalapeno raw.  The third jalapeno was left sitting out in the counter.  The next morning, I was making breakfast and noticed something.  The end of the jalapeno was gone.  It look as though my husband had taken a bite out of it.  I asked him and he told be that he hadn't eaten the jalapeno.  I then noticed some lovely black droppings on the counter and my suspicions were confirmed.  We had a mouse and the mouse was clearly a native Californian. 

View One of the Jalapeno - if you look closely you can see the tiny bite marks

View Two of the Jalapeno - seeds and all for a spicy mouse!

 Needless to say the traps were set that night.  In the morning, the trap was still set but the peanut butter we had put on it was gone - a very lucky mouse indeed.  The trap sat  that way (un-baited) for two days.  On the third day, I walked out to the kitchen to make breakfast and came face to face with my native Californian mouse.  Well, I should say my native DEAD Californian mouse. The stupid mouse had been killed by an un-baited mouse trap.  I call it genetic cleansing.  This is the first round of my anecdotal evidence that these mice may be lucky but they are not the caliber we faced last year.  More to come...

Death toll had risen to 10

Fascinating Survival

I began writing this blog months ago with the focus being on eradicating those pesky mice from our country home.  We have been very successful in this process.  In the last six weeks, we have caught two more mice via traps .  One was in our pantry (no surprise, that seems to be their hub) and one sad mouse lost its battle with a bait-less trap in the back corner of our counter.  Yes, we did disinfect immediately upon find that poor guy.  The trap had been set several days before and the bait had been stolen.  This mouse was obviously not the one who had succeeded in outsmarting the trap since he/she was caught without any bait at all. 

As I have been living in this house for seven months now, my interests in the goings on of the animal population has evolved into a focus on the ability of these creatures we are living with to survive and persevere.  

It is with this interest that I want to introduce you to a simply amazing creature.  This creature is an arachnid (or spider for you less vocabulary enriched folk).    Look carefully and you will be visually introduced to the Wolf Spider:

Wolf Spider - can you find him?

These spiders that I have seen measure in length about 2" across from head to end.  They are similar in size to a small tarantula (we also have these but they are not currently "in season" - more on them in the fall). What fascinates me about these particular spiders is how they have evolved to catch prey.  From what I have observed, they appear to eat large insects by building a very unique form of web.  Wolf Spiders build their webs on the ground where unsuspecting creature will crawl onto the outer edges of the web.

Top View of a Wolf Spider web

In the center of the web you can see a hole.  Wolf Spiderwebs are actually funnels that lead to holes in the ground.  They look much like the funnel you would use to put oil in your car (or in my case one your husband uses to put oil in the car).  Here is a side view of one of their funnels:

Wolf Spider funnel web

The owner of this web will sit inside the hole at the bottom of the web.  When the web is shaken by prey crawling or landing on the web, the Wolf Spider will leap - yes I said leap- out of the hole toward the disturbance.  I have been able to observe this by taking a stick and lightly shaking the web.  Honestly, it is quite startling how fast these spiders are able to come out of those holes.  You may not be a fan of spiders but how may insects do you think these spiders can eat?  Think about how overrun with other insects we all would be without these spiders.

Now, the spider in the picture above was found by my mother in a very sorry state.  We have another creature living with us out here in the country who is a predator to the Wolf Spider and the Tarantula.  Please have a look at the Tarantula Hawk:

Tarantula Hawk - photo found on

4630048757_0a9c314725_z.jpg flickr.com

These Tarantula Hawks are also about 2" from head to end and are a member of the wasp family.  I can say without any hesitation that these wasps are one of the scariest looking things I have ever seen.  Their method of survival is to find an unsuspecting large arachnid and inject them with some sort of substance that renders them paralyzed.  The Hawk then carries/drags the spider to a safe place and lays its eggs inside.  When the eggs hatch, the babies eat the spider inside out. Lovely.  My family and I had the opportunity to watch one of these carry a large tarantula up the wall of a house, across the face of the house for a distance of about 20 feet (turning a corner of the house) and down into some bushes. 

The Wolf Spider my mother found had been paralyzed and was being dragged across the ground by one of these Tarantula Hawks.  When we approached to have a look at it, the Tarantula Hawk flew away. 

The sophistication of these creatures' methods of survival demands our respect despite the fact that it causes us to have that feeling of fear or unease. People are very removed from having to live moment to moment focused on our own survival.  We need to acquaint ourselves with the reality of how most of the world's inhabitants live day to day.  They are focused on one goal - survival.  I find it fascinating.

New Neighbors

Out here in the country we are always happy to welcome new neighbors.  We are especially thankful for those neighbors that help in the reduction of our mass rodent population.  I wrote previously about the rattle snakes and the gopher snakes that are helping keep down the mice.  They are not the only friends joining our fight.  This week we had a new family move in down on our road.  The road up to our property is a dirt lane that winds through the oak trees.  At night it looks something like the Blair Witch Project but during the day it is quite pretty.  Along the east side, there is a small creek bed that only has running water for about three weeks a year.  Over time, this creek has caused many wash outs in the hillside which make great homes for rabbits and squirrels.  We even have witnessed a badger a time or two living near this creek bed.  The west side slops up the oak studded hills and over the years, we have seen many deer, some bobcats, mountain lions, wild pigs, and lots of birds.  We also occasionally see these guys.

Sorry for the poor quality, I was using my PAS.

This little guy is, I am pretty sure, a San Joaquin Kit Fox.

On Friday, I got a call from my mother asking if I had seen the fox that was hanging out on our road.  I had not.  She called back sometime later to let me know that the fox had moved into a den just off the road, he wasn't just hunting in the area.  We love these little guys and I was really looking forward to seeing him. Last night, I needed to run into town and that is when I got my first glimpse of our new friend.  That was when I snapped the picture above.  He was happily sitting in front of his den.  Well, as I was driving home, I got a very pleasant surprise.

Again, using my little PAS so the quality isn't very good.  I cropped the photo so they could be seen but that made it grainy.

There wasn't just one fox, but a pack of at least three.  Here they are sitting outside of their den having a snack.  It is hard to see but the fox on the far right has a small rodent in his mouth.  I love a neighborhood that shares my priorities.  I hope they are here to stay for awhile!!

Outside Help

Well, I wish I had some mousy news to report but we have been given a large amount of outside help with our small infestation.  The weather has warmed up and most of our reptilian friends who were happily sleeping winter away have emerged from their holes.  As a result, our mice have become nice meals for hungry snakes.  In one week we say no fewer then five rattlesnakes and three gopher snakes. Growing up out in the country, seeing a snake is not as shocking as one might think, they are simply part of our existence.  We all learned at an very early age how to tell the difference between a poisonous snack and a non-poisonous snake.  Now we are teaching our kids.  

If you have never needed this knowledge, let me enlighten you in case you encounter one of our slithering friends.  A rattle snake is a viper, meaning they contain venom.  The key to recognizing them is the letter V.  A rattlesnake's head is in the shape of a V or a diamond.  

Here you can see the V or diamond shaped head (image found on redorbit.com)

Some people think you can tell they are rattlers by how they shake their tails.  There are two problems with this method:

1) Baby rattlesnakes do not have rattles and are highly poisonous AND

2) Gopher snakes also shake their tails as an intimidation tactic (pretending to be the poisonous rattlesnake)

A gopher snake's only real defense is that they look a lot like rattlesnakes and sometimes they act like rattlesnakes.  However, gopher snakes are very useful and non-venomous.  They eat all sorts of rodents and that helps people like me who do not want mice running through my house.  A gopher snake has a more stream-lined head, no V, and should be left to go about their business.

He just looks a lot less scary, doesn't he? (image found on buzzle.com)

One last observation about our snake population, we are seeing LOTS of them and they are BIG.  We have seen two gopher snakes that were easily 3 1/2 feet long.  One stretched across the road beyond the width of my wheel base.  My dad and husband had to deal with a rattlesnake in our barn whose body had a circumference of about 6inches.  The good news is that they are easier to spot but wow, if any of them took you by surprise, it would be a heck of a strike.  But again, no mice - I just love how nature can be used to our advantage. Slither on snakes!!

Genocide

Yes, I must confess to committing genocide.  Now, I know that this blog has been dedicated to fighting mice but I think it needs to be about battling nature in many forms.  Today you are getting the first installment of a subject not centered around mice.  

Yesterday, I was out running all over with my mother and grandmother.  After errands were done, I needed to take my grandmother home to take a nap. My grandmother lives with my parents so that means she lives about one hundred yards away from us.  After dropping Grandma at her house, I went home to finish a few things before I needed to run pick up my kids.  I was sitting at my computer (the computer is located in my bedroom) and noticed a buzzing sound.  I looked around and saw no fewer than 26 large black horse flies attempting to fly out the closed windows.  They were EVERYWHERE!  

Two flies beating their wings - they eventually "beat" their way off the sill and onto the carpet.

 I stared at them for a few minutes and did my best to count how many were there.  26 was my best guess since the little buggers kept flying around.  Well, I may be a coward when it comes to disposing of dead mice but I am no coward when it comes to ending the life an unwelcome insect.  I first thought to run get the fly swatter.  I then took a second to picture myself running around madly swinging the swatter in almost convulsive like maneuvers as I tried to kill each and every fly.   I rethought my plan in an effort to maintain some dignity.  

I  made a decision to join a long line of women assassins. Perhaps you are familiar with the most common method of committing murder used by women?  Well, if not, I won't keep you in suspense.  Women are much more likely to use poison to kill their spouses then any other method.  I had this thought as I ran to the pantry and thought, why not?  I grabbed the bug-poisoning spray and headed back.  Upon returning to my bedroom, I proceeded to literally cover my windows with bug spray.  After I hit them with the poison, the flies started to fall and beat their wings very fast.  I was witnessing their last grasp at survival .  Most of the flies fell into the metal track on the windows  so for the next minute or so, I listened to this intense vibrating sound as the fly's beating wings repeatedly hit the metal.  At last, silence and genocide was complete.

One of the few who died in comfort on the carpet.