Infested

We live in a very old house and anyone who lives in an old house knows that not only does it come with history and character, your old house also comes pre-occupied.  And I don't mean the other world ghostly kind of occupants.  (Though your house probably has those as well.)  No, I'm referring to the rodent kind.  In our first summer here, we had a total of 8 bats inside the house.  Not all at once, but that certainly was enough numbers to know we had a problem and that the bats were entering through the house rather than from a door or window left open.  It took one night while I was sitting in my bedroom watching television that something from my window caught my attention.  There was a bat peeking around from the trim of the window.  Yes, the trim.  Not from any part of the window that actually had excess to the outside.  No, he was coming from the wall.

As it turned out we discovered that on the other side of this wall was a brick chimney that had obviously been crumbling over the years.  The result left a gap between the chimney and the actual house.  A perfect location for a colony of bats.  We were horrified to watch at dask the "flight of the bats".  That was what we began calling it.  Endless number of bats flew out from this gap and consequently my house.  It was sickening to realize that many number of bats were housed just on the other side of my bedroom.

The other rodent we have had major issues with is the good old field mouse.  We find mouse droppings everywhere but particularly in the kitchen.  We cannot put anything in the bottom cabinets that is important because they somehow get in there.  We have killed so many mice I couldn't even begin to count them.  We have removed all the cabinets and blocked any access to the kitchen from pipe holes or cracks along the baseboards but still the mice come.  And with an old house, it is next to impossible to figure out how they are actually entering the house period.  There are so many gaps and cracks along the foundation that it only takes the width of an inch for a mouse to slip through.

Our house walls are alive with our neighbours.  You can hear them running from one room to another.  It's nasty.  So is the mess they leave behind.  And killing them is not so easy.  Not only are those little buggers sometimes very illusive when it comes to actually getting snared, but you have to be very agile when setting the traps.  Many a times I've lost my cool trying to get that little flimsy bar to keep the snare part of the trap down.  But then I decided to try a new trap.  It cost more than the cheap dollar trap, but I was willing to try anything.  And it's a good thing I did.

The trap above on the left is the cheap, very effective but nearly impossible to set trap and the one on the right is the new, simple, easy to set and reusable trap.  Yes, that's right.  No throwing the trap out with the mouse.  You simple squeeze the trap back open and dump your dead rodent in the trash.  This trap was so worth every extra dollar I spent on it.  No more getting my fingers snapped or spending an hour trying to balance that little flimsy bar over the trap.  It takes seconds, literally, to set.  We had a mouse in the kitchen so I went out and bought one of these but forgot to set it last night.  Or maybe I didn't but was just too dang tired to stay up longer trying to set the mouse trap.  So when I came downstairs this morning and found more mouse droppings, I opened the new trap, placed a small piece of bread with peanut butter on it, set it on the counter, put the kettle on, went to check my email and while at my computer heard the snap.  Yep, that quick, that effficient.  Now, if I could only figure out how to use it on bats.