A Wee Rodent Problem

By now, you’ve probably come to realize that I like critters, and I like them big and small, furry and feathery.  But I apparently haven’t been very clear about one thing:  I like outside critters to be outside and inside critters to be inside. 

See, one morning about a month ago, I went down into my basement and saw this.

I was kind of thinking the insulation belonged in my rafters and not on my concrete walls, washer and dryer, and began to suspect that perhaps we had an Indecent Rodent in the house.   The first rodent I suspected was the northern short-tail shrew.  Like most people, I put peanuts out to feed shrews, chipmunks and squirrels.  Peanuts cause shrews to squeak as if they’re happy, and allow me to take photos like this one of a shrew taking a peanut from under the doorsill.

The thing about shrews is that they take advantage of me when I’m not looking, and I know this because one day a few years back, I saw two shrews running boldly across our basement floor.  Mark and I set up a few live traps and released a few shrews outside where they belong.  To keep them out, we used some expandable foam in some holes we discovered, and stuffed steel wool in a couple of cracks found in the vicinity of the door sill.  But shrews are rude, tough little buggers and they chewed the expandable foam into bits and simply moved the steel wool out of their way.  We resorted to using pieces of metal on top of expandable foam and that seemed to do the trick for the holes we knew about a couple of years ago.

Knowing that shrews take advantage of us when we’re not looking, I found it quite plausible that they’d made new holes elsewhere, like near my washer and dryer.  But, I wondered, could they have chewed and thrown the insulation around so rudely?

I thought about this while I vacuumed up the insulation bits and vacuumed my walls and floor.  While using the crevice tool to reach behind the dryer, I was surprised to suck up this fella.  He was dry, flat and long departed.

Having verified that shrews were indeed inside the house, I continued vacuuming the walls around my washer and dryer.  While doing so, it occurred to me that perhaps I should clean my dryer duct, which led to removing the long pipe from the elbow.  After cleaning the long pipe, I stood back and wondered if maybe the Indecent Rodent that had messed with my insulation might leave via the open duct.  So I left the pipe disconnected from the outlet for a couple of days. 

The next day, Mark–who teaches some days but not during the summer–reported being in the basement counting fishing lures and coming eye to eye with a fella that looks a lot like this.

Suspecting that the red squirrel was the likely insulation shredder, Mark immediately went to the store and purchased a shiny live trap that looks like this.

We baited the new trap with peanuts and the next morning saw that the trap had been tripped and all the peanuts were missing. Mark took exception to that, so called in the artillery.  An artillery for people that love wildlife looks something like this.

We set up traps throughout the basement and baited them with peanuts.  We also baited the large trap again.  The next morning, we ran our trap line for the first time.  The big trap was again empty and had been tripped.  In other, smaller traps, however, we discovered that we still had live shrews the house.

Northern short-tail shrews have a neurotoxin that they use to paralyze their prey, and I’d heard that it’s not the most pleasant of bites for humans.  So I wore gloves to handle the shrew.

This is what the shrew looks like when it’s in a hole outside where it belongs.

We opened up the next trap and were quite surprised to find one of these.

He or she went hopping off into a nearby brush pile. 

The next trap revealed another mouse, which ran up Mark’s arm and onto his back before Mark bent down and watched it hop away.  It was after releasing the third mouse that I realized we had a wee rodent problem.

We reset our traps, checked them day and night, and continued trapping and releasing more shrews and mice.  It took three weeks of steady trapping before we finally went three nights without catching a critter and stopped our trap line.  Total critters captured and released:  83 mice and 27 shrews.  We never caught anything in the shiny, new, and biggest trap.  And oddly enough, the insulation was never shredded and tossed about again.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and I agree that we should have charged these critters for living Scott-free in our house.  And I also agree that we should probably poke around the outside of the house and look for teeny, tiny signs with directional arrows that say, “Enter here, ye rodents.”  Maybe we’ll even find a hole or two to plug.  No matter, it’s sure to be a fun-filled summer poking around my basement and yard.  I just hope I don’t come face to face with the Indecent Rodent–if he’s down there, he’s a very smart rodent indeed.