Lillooet, B. C. August 23, 2022
Dear Readers, here is a useful, true story I posted on my first-ever website in 2003. If you are ever plagued by mice, you may find it encouraging.
One night, in the grey-yellow streetlamp glow coming through our curtains, my wife informed me that a mouse was sleeping in my beard! This event occurred one week before a scheduled two week family holiday. The poor devil, warm athwart my insulating whiskers was not easily evicted. I managed to finally unseat the reluctant interloper, but he proved impossible to apprehend.
CODE YELLOW
Over the next few nights, the furry imp capered about our indoor flower pots and parkoured around the bedroom. Periodically, it would sprint across the bed. It was imperative that wee animal be captured. We didn’t wish to leave our apartment in its care for half a month.
I tried all commercially available traps and every known bait. My process of elimination culminated in the use of peanut butter, which everyone said was kryptonite to a mouse. My parade of traps were found clean and empty each time I checked. At night, the beast, giddy on peanut butter, did tiny folk-dances on my pillow, swung like a monkey from the potted plants and raced about the floor like a mongoose. Our holiday departure loomed ever closer and I redoubled my efforts.
CODE ORANGE
I sought counsel, did research and tried many clever new locations for the trap placement, but all to no avail. The use of lethal poison was steadfastly ruled out, because a poisoned mouse will logically seek a place under your floor or inside your walls to undergo the separation of its soul from its body. In a humid environment like Vancouver, that could lead to a serious toxic mould issue.
Our nerves began to suffer the accumulative deleterious effects of rodent-induced sleep deprivation. One morning, I found mouse excrement on my beloved 1970s Sansui Stereo! I re-read Sun Tzu’s, The Art Of War and Miyamoto Musashi’s, Book Of Five Rings.
CODE RED
This mouse was scouring my traps even when I tied solid bait on with thread. Erroneously I began to mentally endow my foe with supernatural cunning, which in fact, he did not possess. Turning a trap over in my hand at the kitchen table, disconsolate and exhausted, I noticed that the trap would not spring if one tilted the bait-tray in a skyward direction. It only sprang when the bait tray was pushed earthwards.
Voila! I experienced an epiphany and immediately saw both my problem and its ethereal solution as if they had been illuminated by intellectual lightning. Most mammals have fixed upper jaws! The movable lower teeth and mandibles are used to bite against the fixed upper jaw. Know your enemy. The Hawes Modified Mousetrap was born and it caught the mouse straightaway.
To make your own: Acquire a standard cheap wooden mousetrap. Take a piece of tiny dowel or thin bamboo meat skewer and cut a piece two centimetres long. Drill a tiny hole halfway down the length of the dowel. You can use a piece of copper wire cut on an angle as a drill. A standard straight pin should fit loosely into the hole. Insert the pin and bend it ninety degrees. Split a raw almond lengthwise. Carve one of the pieces into the shape of a violin, as pictured above. Tie the piece of almond to the dowel with thread. Push the pointed end of the pin assembly into the wooden base of the mousetrap. One end of the dowel must be positioned to ride gently on top of the trap’s bait-tray. Set the trap. Put it in a concealed location or along a wall leading to a concealed location. The trap will now spring whether the bait is lifted up or is lowered, as both movements will exert a downward pressure on the bait-tray due to the pivot action of the dowel.
Neighbours in our Vancouver triplex apartment borrowed my modified trap and had great success. It next came to my sad notice that the wiring insulation on some Japanese cars is made of soy based compounds and thus, very attractive to rodents in the Winter. To save thousands of dollars in repairs, you can put a small ventilated container, loaded with old-fashioned moth balls into the engine compartment of your vehicle. The battery strap is a good place to hang it.
In addition to this, the smell of cat urine can be useful. Mice produce prodigious numbers of offspring in very short cycles. Depending on how badly you are infested, a situation can arise where you cannot catch them as fast as they are being created. In order to break the stalemate, know that a chemical in the urine of any feline predator inhibits the production of a key reproductive hormone in female rodents. The effect is that a mama mouse will stop ovulating until the coast is clear. Thus, a bit of baptized kitty litter sprinkled under where your parked vehicle rests can save you a lot of grief.
I first posted this story in 2003 on my Follow The Lynx website. Sixteen years later, two hundred miles and two websites away, I chanced upon a man in Lillooet who had been recently plagued by mice. He related to me a story of a “modified mousetrap” he had found on the Internet, that involved Crazy Glue and a shaved almond in its construction. He said he had caught four dozen of the miniature home-wreckers using it. I just smiled. What ever the problem, remember that you are not alone in your suffering, so why not share solutions?
fin