Help! A MOUSE!! What do I do??

[fiddlejen]

Or maybe even might be more than one. Ughhh!!

I'm scared to put any kind of regular, deadly mouse trap. The day I realized I Might have a mouse, I went and bought some traps. When I got home and looked at them, I realized that Budgies are Not much bigger than mice. They Probably wouldn't go in a trap - but - WHAT IF??

So I ordered a couple "Capt Sure," non-kill, catch-and-release traps. The mice have NO interest in these traps, none.

Recently budgie Jefferson has been having night-terrors again. Night before last was really bad. After he awoke me with his panicked.flapping around in the cage, I had to sit up HOLDING him - (my normally "lookee-no-touchee budgie!) - holding him 45 minutes before he was willing to return to his cage.

That was night-before-last. LAST night I slept more lightly. Last night I awoke to the softer sound of one of them moving around the floor of the cage. Only, when I got up and checked, they were both on their perches at the top of their tall cage.!!

After some hunting and searching, I left the front cover more open, and went back to sleep. Some time later I awoke again to the same sounds. Without moving, flashlight showed Budgies still at top of cage whilst feet sounds below. !!!!!! :17: !!!!

Then, more flashlight actually revealed a tiny culprit sneaking out thru the bars ---uuhhhgghh ahhh---- please help what do I do??

HOW do I get rid of these critters withOUT endangering my Budgies or my Sunny? ??? HELP!!!

:17:

 

[itzjbean]

Are the cages off the ground? On a stand? It's probably interested in the seeds or food left behind from your budgies. Not a fun situation at all!!

The only thing I can think of is getting a seed catcher to place around the bottom of the cage so it can't get in, and ensuring the cage is on a stand, high off the ground with no way of allowing a critter to climb it. The main thing is finding out how its getting into the cage and making a way to ensure it can't get in anymore. From there, I would keep traps out at night under the cage and remove them when birds are out of the cage.


Is it possible to move their cages -- or the birds -- into a carrier to sleep at night and set up a trap inside the cage bottom to catch it?

We have mice show up randomly in the house sometimes but we have two cats who hunt them. Our cages are also about two feet off the ground and uncovered at night so there's no way a mouse could climb up to get to them or fit in the narrow bars.

 

[fiddlejen]

I want a cat. In fact I love cats. However I'm quite allergic and I like breathing more than I love cats. (That's actually why I first took interest in birds.)

Yes the Budgies' cage, and Sunny's new huge day-cage - have built-in stands. The legs are square metal but Im not convinced they're climb-proof. However I suspect it climbed the blanket-cover to get in. This one is tiny and when I saw it, it slipped out Thru the 0.5-inch spaced bars.

So you suggest I put the Capture traps inside the budgie-cage at night? Or - put Budgies into a foodless sleep-cage and then put kill-traps and food in the empty budgie cage? ??

 

[Flboy]

Place a weighted laundry basket over the traps!

 

[Scott]

Mice are voracious breeders.... once they set up shop all bets are off. Best tactic is aggressive and thorough action! No-kill traps are most humane, but also work to seal off all possible entrances to your home. This can be very time consuming and requires attention to the smallest of holes/cracks/gaps.

 

[SailBoat]

Welcome to an early Winter in the Great White North!
It is common for mice to search for a warmer place in the Winter and if it has an ongoing supply of food - jackpot!
If you live in an Apartment house, contact your Landlord and inform them of the mouse problem. Their response is likely to run the full gamut from total disinterest to rapid response.

Whether you own you own home or live in an apartment, you should be proactive in vastly limiting the mice interest in your place. This starts inside by eliminating food sources. Cleaning up before bedtime, using mouse proof containers (zero cardboard containers)

Move the birds as stated above!
At lights out, no food in the cage(s), including the bottom.

Access points! If its your home, you want to investigate and eliminate access points into your home. This is a process that involves a detailed search in the basement, around outside access points (doors, windows, thru wall cuts for electrical, plumbing, all side wall vents, etc...) No expansion Foam is a great tool. But it is best to search out and clearly mark areas that you need to fill prior to starting. Once you start, you need to keep moving until you are done as rarely does the product can allow a start and stop for awhile process.

FYI: The more access points you close, the lower your energy cost for heating your home!

 

[KawaiiTori]

Probably the most important thing to keep your budgies safe to to make sure there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON for a mouse or mice to have interest in their cages! This means an EXTREMELY thorough clean of their cages and surrounding areas EVERY SINGLE NIGHT! Cage liners will need to be changed and any little bits of seed or food will need to be vacuumed out of the cage and off of the floors around the cage. Then if you want to ensure that mice can’t get into the cage construct cones that you can put around the legs of the cage stands (wide side of the cone pointed down so that the mice can’t crawl around them). These steps should ensure that the mice lose interest in your birds’ cages. Then comes the joy of mouse proofing the rest of your house as mentioned above! Best of luck!

 

[bill_e]

The humane traps do not work well at all. Old fashioned mouse traps do work very well. Also Dcon works great.

During the colder months my cats get one or two mice a night in the house. In my workshop I use Dcon. And in my camper I use fabric softener sheets.

Bucket mouse traps work the best

It's pretty impossible to seal up a house from the critters.

 

[Laurasea]

The humane traps do not work well at all. Old fashioned mouse traps do work very well. Also Dcon works great.

During the colder months my cats get one or two mice a night in the house. In my workshop I use Dcon. And in my camper I use fabric softener sheets.

Bucket mouse traps work the best

It's pretty impossible to seal up a house from the critters.

I tried the bucket trap ours for the rats thstvidit my wildbutd feeders didn't work at all...
The live traps work great for me, bsit with peanut butter

 

[bill_e]

The humane traps do not work well at all. Old fashioned mouse traps do work very well. Also Dcon works great.

During the colder months my cats get one or two mice a night in the house. In my workshop I use Dcon. And in my camper I use fabric softener sheets.

Bucket mouse traps work the best

It's pretty impossible to seal up a house from the critters.

I tried the bucket trap ours for the rats thstvidit my wildbutd feeders didn't work at all...
The live traps work great for me, bsit with peanut butter

Like with all traps bait is important. Seeds floating on the water in a bucket trap works as does a little bacon grease but as with anything, what works for some doesn't work for others. With live traps you'e supposed to drive something like 3 miles away before you release the critters.

 

[Aspie_Aviphile]

Mice are peaceful herbivores, and their pee doesn't do serious damage to the floorboards like cat pee does, so I could understand painfully murdering intruder cats with mechanical traps and agonising poison before I could understand doing it to mice, but for some reason only the former is illegal in most countries.

My old neighbours caught several mice and even rats (who actually WOULD prey on budgies) in harmless traps and enjoyed the satisfaction of helping wildlife by releasing them in appropriate places. You can even make a picnic day out of it, and educate your children about wildlife, wild mice, the problem of human encroachment as an invasive species in most parts of the world leading to more and more animals entering human homes as theirs are destroyed, and how intellgent and sweet and gentle mice are, in captivity sociable enough to make good pets just like their own dear budgies.

 

[bill_e]

Aspie_Aviphile,
While mouse pee might not harm floors I can tell you that it does a job on steel tools and woodworking equipment as it is very corrosive. And tearing into clothing for nesting material last year alone cost me over $300. The little b@$*@%#$ even ate a $40 bag of felt wads I left on my bench overnight.

If it would help, I'd pay my cats a bounty for every one they dispatched.

 

[Noahs_Birds]

Buy the cage traps that the mice have to crawl through the funnel : https://www.google.com.au/search?q=...UIESgB&biw=1880&bih=938#imgrc=XD1VRPcxNRnKUM:


They are very safe and catch catch more than just one mouse.
Then simply dispatch of the mice as you please
Thanks
Noah Till

 

[noodles123]

Get lots of live traps-- they work but you do have to take the mouse like 3 miles away to release them and then make sure you attend to the hole through which they entered.

I have never used anything but live traps and as long as your problem isn't too extreme, it works.
Just make sure you transport them far from your home AND CHECK TRAPS EVERY MORNING/eve---or you will slowly kill a sad mouse

 

[fiddlejen]

What about peppermint oil - Strong, pure food-grade strong strong peppermint oil - I understand it might repel rodents and I used to apply it around possible entrances, and never had a mouse problem before. ((If course, I also didn't gave seed-scatterers in my living room before either. )) I stopped putting unscented-talc powder around all the walks & stopped the peppermint & the eucalyptus oil. All for fear that anything that pests or rodents might dislike, would probably be a risk to Birdies. So now, I have mice!! Would strong peppermint around my baseboard heaters be too dangerous??

 

[noodles123]

What about peppermint oil - Strong, pure food-grade strong strong peppermint oil - I understand it might repel rodents and I used to apply it around possible entrances, and never had a mouse problem before. ((If course, I also didn't gave seed-scatterers in my living room before either. )) I stopped putting unscented-talc powder around all the walks & stopped the peppermint & the eucalyptus oil. All for fear that anything that pests or rodents might dislike, would probably be a risk to Birdies. So now, I have mice!! Would strong peppermint around my baseboard heaters be too dangerous??

With birds I would avoid strong oils...they do impact the human body (aromatherapy) because it enters the lungs and goes to the blood---if you have it by the heaters etc your birds will breathe it in...now, outside, that would be different.

 

[ravvlet]

I too prefer live traps and a stringent cleaning routine to discourage mice. However, to the poster who implied mice pee was harmless- sure. But their feces can carry hantavirus, at least here in the states. You don’t want them leaving droppings where it could contaminate food or dry out and be breathed in.

I have had great success with peanut butter as bait in combination with commercial live traps (the gravity kind) and bucket traps. The poisons are awful to them as well as highly toxic to everything else and sometimes bad for the environment.

The number one way is honestly going to be 1.) cleaning their cages every night and 2.) dumping their food before bed. You should be changing their food out for fresh food every day anyway.

 

[noodles123]

I too prefer live traps and a stringent cleaning routine to discourage mice. However, to the poster who implied mice pee was harmless- sure. But their feces can carry hantavirus, at least here in the states. You don’t want them leaving droppings where it could contaminate food or dry out and be breathed in.

I have had great success with peanut butter as bait in combination with commercial live traps (the gravity kind) and bucket traps. The poisons are awful to them as well as highly toxic to everything else and sometimes bad for the environment.

The number one way is honestly going to be 1.) cleaning their cages every night and 2.) dumping their food before bed. You should be changing their food out for fresh food every day anyway.

Agree completely on the virus side of things--- but I do think some states are worse than others. I was going to mention that, so I am glad you did.

 

[Betrisher]

If you have one mouse, you probably have a colony, especially in winter. They're cold! They look for somewhere to set up shop and survive until spring. I know a lot of people find them distasteful, but they're only tiny animals trying to make their way in the world. You don't *have* to kill them.

Humane traps are OK. They do work most times, only occasionally they will fail. It takes patience is all. What are you using for bait? My preferred bait is a tiny smear of peanut butter: just enough for mousie to get the smell, but not enough for him to track it all over the place, thus destroying the appeal of the trap.

My preferred trap is my own home-made one. I barely smear my peanut butter just inside the rim of a two-litre plastic bottle (Australian milk bottles work perfectly for this). I put a scant pinch of cookie crumbs inside the bottle to encourage mousie to go right to the bottom. It's good to achieve a kind of trail effect: a crumb or two near the neck and a trail leading to a small pile at the bottom. Next, I tie a *long* string round the neck of the bottle, place it on its side so that it's facing a spot where mousie is known to lurk and thread the other end of the string directly upward around something (door handle? back of a chair?) that will enable me to pull sharply and right the bottle, hopefully with mousie inside. Then, I sit down and wait for mousie.

I know it sounds like a lot of mucking around and it's probably not something most people would bother to do. Only, having bred mice for a long time, I simply *cannot* bring myself to kill their little wild brothers. So I use my milk bottle trap and deliver the little stinkers to culvert up the road, where they live to fight another day.

One year, we had a dreadful mouse plague in our town and I caught eighty-three mice using this method. Someone suggested to me I was catching the same mouse eighty-three times, so I began marking my captures with pink nail polish before releasing them. I never re-caught a marked mouse, so there!

Round about that time, a red-bellied black snake came to live under our house and mice suddenly disappeared. We called him Snidely and he lived happily with us for about five years. Then, one day, he moved on. Mice returned. Trap deployed. Happiness!

PS. Wild mice are *tiny* animals and can easily get into a budgie cage. While they're mostly interested in finding food, they may well go for your budgies if they're afraid, so it's a good idea to get rid of them quickly.

 

[noodles123]

I too have had success with home-made traps---granted, that was one mouse (vs many).
They can be tricky, but peanut butter is a great bait.
I agree with what you said above---PB is my "go-to" (or at least, has been, when I have had a mouse or 2 ).