Well, life has certainly been crazy with the mice around here. When the weather began to get cooler, the mice invaded - lots of mice. Whatever room we went into, we could hear mice scurrying away. We do have an electronic rodent repelling device, and it does drive some of them away. We also put out peppermint and other "scented" things that mice don't like. Some of them may have left because of that. Three of them got caught in traps.
While we seem to have gotten rid of most of the mice, there are a couple of stragglers left. The bad thing is that they seem to be getting less and less afraid. One of them has been getting up on the night stand beside my bed, and last night he was climbing up and down my curtain! My window is only about three feet away from my bed. I do not want that thing to get in bed with me!
Today I went about setting two more traps and putting two of the others in more strategic locations. We had thought that the remaining mice were not paying any attention to the traps. However, when I was moving them, I noticed the one that had been under the sink had no bait left in it. It looked like half the bait was gone from the one in the living room. These are not regular snap traps but walk-in traps. In order the get the bait, the mice must walk into the trap. The bait is at the back of the trap. The trap is supposed to spring when the mice walk in. So, here is the question - Do we have really smart mice or do we have defective traps? Well, we know that at least one of the traps works because we already caught a mouse in it. The trap was still good, so we just reset it. So, we still wonder how they were able to get the bait without the trap springing. I reloaded the traps with generous amounts of peanut butter and bird seed. Mice love bird seed. That way the mice will have to work at the bait a while. Maybe we can catch the last two. Just maybe. :-)