Unauthorized Migrants

Note: We have gone on a small mini vacation and depending on my level of relaxation and access to my iPad (my girls like to use it for their entertainment), your comments my be slow appearing as too my comments to them.

*************************

When we moved into this house a dozen years ago, I discovered some rodent residents in the attic space and bought some poison which I scattered out up there and they went away. I fortified the defenses such as repouring a severely buckled garage floor and put in a new door as well as stuffed steel wool into a couple perforations through the side of our house for various utilities. I declared victory and haven't seen a rodent in the decade plus years since.

Last week, my wife said she spotted a mouse in the garage as she pulled her car in for the night. I assumed he must have gotten in at some point when the garage door was open during a yard work session but I wanted to take action before things got out of control. I found my bucket of poison I had used 12 years ago, pulled out two packages and sprinkled the contents of one of them here and there around the perimeter of the garage, set the extra package on a bench near the house door and called it a night.

Yesterday, I decided to clean up a few things on my work bench, a place that frequently attracts clutter, and I noticed an empty bite sized Kit Kat wrapper. Having eaten one there a couple weeks ago while working on a project, I assumed I had forgotten to toss it in the trash but when I looked closer, I could see it had been gnawed open... not torn as I would. The Kit Kat was completely gone and more suspiciously, there was some mouse feces nearby.

I got up and started looking at the spots where I had sprinkled the mouse poison. It was all gone. I walked over to the bench near the house door and picked up the other package I had put there. It had been gnawed into and the contents half devoured. Obviously it had lost it's potency or the mouse in my garage was immune. 

After a fruitless search for any mouse traps I might have had at one point, I made a trip to farm supply store and picked up a package of four traps and after baiting them with Nutella, I set them around the garage. About an hour later, my youngest daughter who was working on the dining room table, said she heard a snap come from the garage. A quick check showed that I had caught a very robust looking mouse in one of my traps and another one had been tripped. I reset the traps and went back inside.

Thirty minutes later, I looked out and saw I had caught two more mice. Egads, I had more than a single mouse, I had a tribe. I emptied and reset the traps and called it a night. This morning, two more mice had met their deaths. The traps have been rebaited and reset. I hope I don't catch any more. Having them living in my garage is just too close for comfort and I certainly don't want them inside the house. 

I hope these unauthorized migrants to my garage have learned that it is no bueno and they return to their home of origin and leave my garage in peace. I had a lot of food stored in my garage for a couple months as part of my charity work which I gave away the week of Thanksgiving and none of it had been tampered with so I'm assuming these are were recent migrants. I'm also assuming somewhere outside my house, somebody is wondering where that family of five disappeared too.