Mouse Hunt

*Note, this posting is not for the squeamish or extreme bird lovers.

Well I promised I would post about our recent infestation. Yes, apparently we have become the local hotel for Opelika's mouse population. I know my tone is extremely light right now, but this is how I avoid throwing up everything I think about a mouse snuggling up with my innocent baby in three months.

It all started about a week before Thanksgiving. I was doing some laundry and noticed a few pellet shaped things on top of the dryer. I am no fool and I knew what they were supposed to be, but there was no way I was accepting the fact that we were housing rodents. So the next evening I lifted Radly and Kramer's bag of dog food and found a whole collection of pellets. Even then, I just was in denial, I thought well maybe they are just dead bugs or balls of lent, or well freaking rat poop. So I opted to tell Bill about the disgusting discovery I had made and he said yeah I have been finding pellets around the house too. Immediately I was mad, " What, you have seen rat poop and did not tell me?! How could you?!" Then he simply replied, "Did you really want to know?" the truth was no!

So the next night Bill was having some grad school friends over for a Thanksgiving dinner. I was preparing the appetizers and had to get something out of the pantry. I went over to the pantry picked up the bread and crumbs started falling out the huge hole at the bottom of the bag. The rat/mouse/small deer had eaten through our bread bag and through like 5 pieces of bread. Well no wonder the dang things are living in our house, they are living pretty. Warm bed (probably snuggling up with our worthless dogs at night), plenty of food, and no distracting traps. After I found the bread situation, I started looking around the pantry and there were holes in a ton of our packaged food and poop everywhere. Bill and I probably threw away around $300 worth of groceries once all of his friends left and I told him I was not sleeping until he went to get traps.

Bill took an 11 o'clock trip to Winn Dixie and bought the only traps they had, poisoned pellets. We set them everywhere we found terds, which was in every room and every closet except our bedroom, thank goodness. I mean we found terds in the laundry room, o9ur pantry, the garage, our two linen closets, our COUCH, EVERYWHERE!!!!!!!

Since then we have yet to see a mouse terd or mouse. Bill tells me to prepare myself to find a dead mouse on our floor when I come home from work one day, but let's face it- how do you prepare for that? The pellets we got kill the mice from the inside out. So we probably have a family of dead, dried out mice in our walls. Man I can't wait until we decided to tear one down and it starts raining mice.

This is not where my story ends my friends, when we left to go to New York we decided to set some sticky traps too, just in case. So we bought about 10 sticky mouse traps and set them everywhere, including the garage. Well, just tonight Bill decided to tell me some horrifying news. I told him how I saw a dead baby deer on the side of the road on my way to work this morning and had to pull off the road to cry for the poor thing. Then he let out the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He told me a horrible thing happened in one of our mouse traps in the garage. He said he came home for lunch on Tuesday and found a baby bird trapped in our sticky mouse trap. He said it was horrible, the poor thing was trying to flap, but its wing was caught in the stickiness. He went over to the bird and had to break the bird's wing in order to get it out of the stickiness, then he set it free in our front yard. He said it was horrible, because the poor thing was starring at him every time he pulled and it start squeaking. I mean I was just tearing up hearing this story. I will have to say I am way glad Bill found this situation instead of me, I would have set up a small vigil around the bird and prayed for it speedy recovery.

Needless to say, our mouse traps have been useless, but we have managed to catch one defenseless baby bird and break its wing. If you come over for a Christmas dinner at our house, don't bring anything with a dairy product in it, you may just awaken a small visitor.