Rodent proofing your home

Older techniques of controlling mice, such as trapping and poisoning, can also endanger companion animals and children. Live traps can be used to humanely trap and re-locate mice, but unless you mouse-proof your house, you will have a continual problem.

Basically, mice like your house because you offer food, water and shelter. Eliminate these and your problems will be over.

Realistically, begin by removing the food source. Grains, sugar, candies, pastas, nuts, dry pet foods, etc. should be stored in lidded glass or metal jars, not in plastic bags and containers. Keep your bread in a breadbox, not on the counter. Dribbles around the mouths of syrup, honey and jam jars should be washed off before the containers are put away. Fruit with broken skin should be refrigerated as should potatoes and onions, unless you can keep them in a mouse-proof cupboard. Drawers are virtually impossible to mouse-proof so don’t keep edibles in them. If you garden or keep wild bird seed, store your seeds in mouse-proof containers. Check your exterior areas for bee-hives. A honeycomb can feed a thousand mice all winter.

Mouse-proofing your house may take some time. A mouse can squeeze through any pencil sized opening. Inspect your upper cupboards for pencil sized cracks. The cupboard under your kitchen sink is probably the most mouse-vulnerable one in your house. Check for openings around pipes, etc. Seal any of these small openings with tin or lath, as mice can chew through caulking. Shove bits of steel wool into other cracks you find. Mouse-proofing your kitchen will probably solve most of your mouse problems. If they can’t find anything good to eat, they’ll move out pretty quickly.

Mice and rats can be very persistent in their efforts to invade your home, and often, our feeble attempts at rodent proofing only bring frustration and failure. They are sneaky little devils, but if you know a little of what their capabilities are, perhaps this will enable you to deal with them simply by out smarting them.

Rats and mice can:

• Run along or climb electrical wires, ropes, cables, vines, shrubs and trees. Knowing this, you should trim the vegetation from around your home. Try to leave a couple of feet between your house and the vegetation. You should also check any wires or cables that enter your home. Remember, a pencil-sized opening around a cable or wire is sufficient for mouse entry. Rodents have a hard time chewing through a hard, flat surface. Consequently, rubber and vinyl are not recommended, but metal squirrel baffles, cement, mortar and masonry are good rodent deterrents.
  
  
• Climb almost any rough, vertical surface: wood, brick, concrete, screen and weathered sheet metal, or crawl horizontally along pipes or conduits. If you’ve seen rodents using these surfaces of your home, find out where they’re headed- probably to a source of food or shelter. Inspect your premises and block their access to the food or shelter.
  
  
• Rodent control is not an easy job. As long as they can find some source of food and/or shelter in or near your home, they will remain there. We had a problem both in our medical facility and in our food storage area. We changed from hard plastic food containers to metal trash cans with tight fitting lids and almost overnight our rodent problem disappeared in our food storage area. The problem in our medical facility took a long time to correct, but we finally have it under control. Rats and mice were everywhere because at night the facility is unoccupied except for recuperating animals in cages. Our clean-up started with the obvious. We bought a rodent proof trash can with a tight lid. We also made it a point to remove the trash before dark. Even though they couldn’t get in the trash can, they tried if there was trash left overnight. We then ditched all of our plastic food containers and went to metal cans. We left nothing out that could be construed as food or nesting material to a rodent. Our refrigerator became the catch-all for everything from the rubber lid to our blender to our medications that come in any containers but glass. When the little rodents learn to open the refrigerator, they can have the place! We discovered that they will chew on anything but glass and metal. We then searched every nook and cranny of the facility, in cabinets, closets, doors, behind the refrigerator, behind our storage units and at the ceiling and floor moldings. Any hole we found was packed with steel wool. Larger holes that could be further sealed were nailed over with pieces of tin cut from coffee cans. Whenever possible, moth balls were dropped into the holes prior to the wool and tin applications. We then began our search for holes on the outside and followed the same procedures with those holes as we did on the inside.
  
  

While we will never advocate the use of poisons, snap traps or glue traps, we do recommend humane trapping and releasing them into a suitable habitat. Don’t release rodents in your neighbor’s yard even if he is a jerk. They will be back in your house before you are! Take them to a non-residential area where they will not invade other buildings. Rodents do, in fact, fill an important niche in our eco-system.

Although difficult, humane rodent control is not an impossible task and does protect many other species from dying due to our often barbaric methods of rodent control.

We hope to soon add a "Mailbag" section to our column in which we’ll answer any questions you might have about our native flora and fauna. Both youngsters and adults are encouraged to submit questions at any time. If our collective brains cannot answer your question, we will try to refer you to someone who can. Please send any and all questions to our e-mail address or to our snail mail address listed in contact us.

Click here for a printable collection of the articles listed above from the booklet "Bats In Your Belfry, Tips On Co-Existing With Urban Wildlife."