Two weeks ago, or there abouts, a mouse entered our lives rather more intimately than we felt comfortable with. It probably jumped in through the conservatory door on the Friday and, finding the interior warmer, and plentiful food supplies, settled in for a quiet winter. I first noticed its presence on Sunday when there was an unexpected rustling sound by the window when I went out to check the conservatory plants. The rustling repeated on Monday, when I went to fetch the battery lantern and then on Tuesday, as I tapped away on the keyboard of my office, next to the conservatory, a brown mouse ran behind my comfy chair from the conservatory door.
The conservatory, garden room and my office are all well interconnected, but the doors giving access further into the house are mildly more rodent proof. I started being careful about closing these doors. More worryingly, the garden room is currently being refurbished and there is access to the house wall cavity from there, end thence the loft and who knows where else.
After failing to remember where my mass-produced and highly efficient humane mouse trap is stored, I thought to use a model one I put together for the amusement of my children a few years back. This device has only ever worked once with any success, when I managed to get a mouse in my car. I found the base and the lid, baited the contraption with peanut butter in a milk carton lid and left it primed in the centre of the room, with a paint pot to prevent the lid being lifted. The following morning I found my trap with the door wedged half open with the milk lid, but no mouse in evidence except by the tooth marks in the butter.
I left the trap, more carefully primed in the same place for the next half week, and then thinking that the mouse may have suffered some trauma with it the first time round, tried moving it to a new location, but to no avail. The mouse was evidently still free and active, visiting my office again, rustling on the window sill (where there was a scattering of birdseed from a split bag).
Last Saturday, I checked the trap as normal and decided to clean out the bird feeder that hangs outside the kitchen. I levered all the old peanuts out, washed it, refilled it using a bag of nuts from the conservatory and re-hung it outside. I closed the conservatory door to the kitchen carefully behind me and sat in my office, playing on the computer. Half way through the morning there was a frantic scrabbling sound, as of trapped rodent. At last my trap has worked I thought. I walked round to the conservatory, but the trap was still open. There on the window sill the bag of peanuts was jumping around. I grabbed the top, rolled it, pegged it and peered at my little adversary. My children showed some friends up the road and then let it go 300 yards and a water course away from the house.
So I have to ask myself; had I not planted the idea of peanuts in the mouse's mind, would it still have risked the peanut bag? or was it just the most cunning psychological mouse trap ever?
