 |
| Image via Wikipedia |
About a week ago a young man commented on my blog and so I looked at his. A fellow Mainer, although about three hours away, he was experiencing rodent issues in his home.
Our old house in a different area of Maine had been built in 1974. We moved in 1984. No one told us it was a stop on the rodent underground railway. The builders hadn't bothered with important things like insulation, or making sure a wall joined up to the chimney stack next to it. Contractor-special defined virtually every item in the place.
The first sign of activity was scratching in the wall, which I first heard while my husband was on his first business trip. I did not sleep for three days. After that our cats enjoyed a cornucopia of rodents ever flowing through cracks and voids. Some of our cats were not so interested—I once walked upstairs to see one of our girls sleeping with a chipmunk on her tail. Oh that was a fun afternoon.
Whe we remodeled our kitchen our first need after removing the old cabinets to the garage was demolishing the interior walls. We discovered two things: there was no sheet rock separating the soffit from the cabinets and the top of our cabinets had amounted to a lover's leap for mice. When we removed the wall which had adjoined that space we discovered skeletal mice layered at least to my knee.
As we discovered there was no sheet rock above that cabinet space we had to choose removing the entire ceiling or patching in around the edge. We opted for the former and when pulling down an area around a junction box discovered that the mice had considred that area their toilet; no doubt before jumping off that cliff to their deaths they decided on one last potty stop. But as we pulled down the ceiling, a bushel-worth of mouse crap fell onto my poor husband's head and then scattered through the open space like ball bearings.
We never got rid of the mice, instead we just got more cats.
In the new house, flying squirrels somehow got into our attic. Of course, this was discovered while my husband was on a business trip. It is really dangerous as they seem to believe electrical wires are food or they have a serious need to floss. We ended up having a squirrel-removing guy come and humanely trap them and then sealing our roof line with mesh. Knock on or, touch, wood, we haven't had any since. We keep all birdseed in our garage freezer and not out on the garage floor and are also careful in keeping any food stuffs where they might be found by rodents. The deal is, that even on the edge of the town we are in the wild. There are fox, turkey, mice, squirrels (red and gray), chipmunks, fisher cats and coyotes all over the place. We have had those and groundhogs, porcupines deer, and I once saw a mink!
Having the nature around us means we have to take steps to keep it out of the house. It is the simple truth about rodents.
