Mice…. and I'm not talking about these…
I'm talking these!
Mice with long tails and twitching whiskers are little monsters - though I do find them quite cute and I'm not scared of them. This winter a family have set up home in our old stone garage. Mr H and I call them the Mickey and Minnie (not very original I know) and have yet to see them, but we know they're there.
We live out in the countryside, there is farmland and woods and bracken-covered hills all around us so it's not surprising that they've found their way into the peripheries of our home. The garage, where we only happen into on occasion in the colder months, seems to have been perfect for them.
The evidence these little monsters are there…
There is a bag of old horse feed that has been munched from the bottom up, spilling the contents on to the floor. I'd imagine that Mickey and Minnie are now obese as it was high-calorie horse feed!
Mr H went to wash his car the other day only to discover his bright yellow sponge half gone and teeny tiny pieces of it spread around the base of the bucket - oh yes, they can climb.
I then went to get a vase from one of the shelves and was greeted with a few droppings - yuk!
I do have a cat, rescued like all of my animals, and she is actually a pretty good hunter (or she was in her younger days) so I could set her in the garage to solve the problem. But no, I can't, Mickey and Minnie are all fat and cozy in their yellow sponge bed with a feast fit for a king and no doubt reading from their Kindles. They can stay for now, because soon they'll be off. Once we start banging around and clearing out the garage they'll dart away into the hedgerows once more, no doubt multiplied but that's just the way it goes. I guess I'm a live-and-let-live kind of gal - as long as Mickey and Minnie stay in the garage and don't bring all their mates for a party that is, because that would be a disaster!
I'm with you, Lily. As long as they stay OUT of my living areas, I'm okay with other critters living close to me. One of my sons wanted to be an entomologist when he was about 3, so he trained us not to kill bugs we find in the house, especially spiders. We have bug jars all over and we trap them, then if it's warm outside, we put them outside in the bushes. If it's too cold, we toss them into the crawl space under the main part of our house. Always seemed better kharma to me. But I do make exceptions to stinging things. Those I spray with hairspray (it clogs the air holes in the wings of any flying insects and is safer for the family than bug sprays) and when they drop to the ground and pitifully try to crawl away, I toss them out of the house no matter the weather. Another of my sons once got stung repeatedly when he touched the wrong piece of wood as he fell while learning to roller blade. I've never forgiven stinging insects for that!
ReplyDeleteThose critters that live symbiotically with us are okay, but man's predators, as Fiona says, seem all to be tiny, and I feel it's okay to protect ourselves from being eaten or injured by them. A natural law of self-preservation.
ReplyDeleteI don't like bugs - or anything with more than four legs. We had mice and rabbits in our garage in Henderson NV, didn't mind them though they made me jump sometimes when they'd dart out from under the garbage bag when I was least expecting it! What a wuss.
ReplyDeleteThis post is adorably illustrated, as usual. And I'm not crazy about having mice around, but I also don't like to kill them. I've often wished I could negotiate agreements with certain creatures...
ReplyDeleteWe lived for decades in a 1790's old mill in the midst of the New England forest. It was - shall we say - very permeable to wildlife. I'll never forget the time the cats chased a flying squirrel up into the corner of the living room ceiling...
ReplyDeleteGreat post. Lucky mice!