Yes, it happened again! I had another little visitor, which was not surprising really as most days the kitchen door is left wide open and any small creatures can and do just come strolling in at their leisure. The first signs that my new uninvited guest had taken up residence about a week ago were an up-ended open bag of pistachio nuts that I found on my kitchen work-top one morning surrounded by nibblings, followed later that morning by several whole nuts that had been secreted behind a row of storage jars.<\/p>\n
There were few other signs for a few days, but then I began to come across several of those special unhygienic little calling-cards that mice always leave behind them wherever they roam, so I decided that I’d have to do something about it. After my previous experience, I decided that setting up my so-called humane trap would just prolong my agony, so I went straight to plan B, the super-snapper trap that I hoped would despatch the little creature without too much ado.<\/p>\n
The morning after the first night that I set up the trap, I came down to find that although I’d set it up properly, the little beggar had succeeded in snaffling the bait off it without setting it off. That was because I’d pushed the tab with a hole in it that holds the bait, too far up the little bar that retains the snapper, but even so, it demonstrated that the clever little devil could operate with a very light touch and some skill! So the next night I bent the tab down a bit and re-set the trap, only to find in the morning that I’d gone too far, that the bait had just been swiped and again the trap hadn’t gone off, because it couldn’t. And I managed to do the same thing again the next night, which probably made the mouse think that he’d found a handy mouse feeder!<\/p>\n
But maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, because I guess by this time it was being lulled into a false sense of security. Last night I took special care to set the bait higher by bending the tab a little more and setting it in ‘hair-trigger’ mode right on the tip of the snapper retaining bar. This time the tiny rodent’s luck ran out and I entered the kitchen this morning to find that the trap had done its job. I don’t like having to kill anything if I can avoid it, but my previous experience showed me that when mice move into your house, you have little choice. However, I’m glad to say that the unfortunate little animal, which was actually quite a bit bigger than I’d expected, didn’t suffer and had obviously been despatched quickly and cleanly. And it had also enjoyed the benefit of several warm, comfortable, well-fed days of hospitality at my expense before its sudden and unexpected demise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes, it happened again! I had another little visitor, which was not surprising really as most days the kitchen door is left wide open and any small creatures can and do just come strolling in at their leisure. The first signs that my new uninvited guest had taken up residence about a week ago were … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5245"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5273,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245\/revisions\/5273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}