⚡ March 20, 2018
Training Mice 🐭 🐭 🐭
A fourth Nor’easter is blowing toward us, and the day is gray. Yesterday I rearranged many of my branch-and-twig wattles that I like to make. The windfall of raw materials is abundant, and now a new snow blanket is forecast and our woodpile and twigpiles are secure and covered.
I have been luxuriating in the internet, learning about Cambridge Analyitca and deciding on how to make firestarters from dryer lint, toilet-paper rolls, and melted candle wax. Yesterday I made a mouse feeding station right outside our back door.
It’s not as crazy as it sounds; in fact, it’s downright scientific. As longtime readers may already know, I remove stinkbugs from my presence by grabbing them in a tissue and putting the whole wad outside, sometimes overnight. I assume the bug works its way out of the gently swaddled tissue wrap and goes on its way.
I retrieve the tissue the next day, and sometimes I forget it for a few days, which is how I found that mice were coming around the tissue themselves. Mice leave evidence. Let’s leave it at that. So, I reasoned: If I can make a nice, reliable feeding space for them, maybe they will stop coming inside and looking for food in all the wrong places.
It is worth a try, because my guilt is mighty and squickiness is high when it comes to traps. I also have an endless job of cleaning out drawers and whatever cabinets they have breached in their search for food. Peanut butter draws them to their doom; foil-wrapped Christmas chocolates fill endless hours of snacking and shredding fun for them. So, that’s what I put into the feeder: peanut butter on a bed of nuts with a nice chocolate mint, wrapped in foil to top it all off.
I’ll let you know if it works. 🐔