On our first night down back in the desert, I went back on mouse watch. We’ve been rodent free since last August, but our luck ran out in Glen Canyon. I heard one trying to get into out garbage (crinkling the plastic bag) which meant that I then had to spotlight it with my phone light and wake Mike up. It seemed pretty unperturbed by our presence or the light, scampering all around the floor of the trailer. Mike suggested I open the door and to try to shoo it out and that actually worked. Unfortunately, when we went back to bed, I heard more rustling. This one seemed a bit more skittish and would rather run under the couch than run out the door when offered the chance. Mike was able to get back to sleep in spite of my inability to stop trying to keep track of the mouse.
Over the next couple of nights I learned what I needed to do to be able to sleep – cover the sinks to protect the scrub brush (one got torn apart by the skittish mouse), put the garbage out in the truck, and trust that the mice will not run over me in my sleep. I’m still working on that last one.
We pulled the mouse traps out again the next day, but they did no good. The mouse did not seem as interested in almond butter and rice crackers and while I was quietly drinking my tea in the morning, I saw the mouse right over the trap and not spring it. I tried to catch it with a bowl and almost succeeded, but only got the tail and then was unable to follow through with the actual catch.
This led us to purchasing some different traps. This time we went new school and old school – a humane trap that can catch up to 4 mice at a time and a pack of old school wooden spring traps. We used some of our old peanut butter to try to lure the little bugger/s in… and it worked. We caught two relatively quickly and thought we were good.
And then we were sitting outside enjoying a sunset when a mouse scampered in from the desert and started running all around and over Mike’s feet. Up until this point, he had been convinced that we brought the mice with us from the forest up on the mountain, but nay, they were desert dwellers. We could do nothing to scare this mouse away. He would briefly run under the trailer, but would then come back out and scurry all around, usually heading near Mike.
That night we caught another mouse, but Mike was unable to tell if it was the one that we had seen the night before. (It did have a rather distinctive cheek growth. We were a little concerned that it had something that was affecting its behavior and that we didn’t want to get too close to.)
And we will continue to bait our traps for a while and hopefully figure out how they are getting in this time.
P.S. We never did figure out how the mice were getting in, but didn’t have any more!