Back Country Pest Control
The Great Mouse War of 2021 & Building a Mormon High Dive
Backwoods living comes with many constants that folks living in larger cities don’t always (yes, I am looking at you NYC) have to contend with... One of those constants that took my wife and I along time to come to terms with, and even longer to solve for, were all of the mice that wanted to be room mates!
You see, when your home backs up to three-thousand acres of public land you best believe that those little critters will find their way into the relative warmth of your home no matter what preventative efforts you put in place. This type of infestation is a problem for several different reasons...
You end up with holes in your dry goods (think rice, flour, cookies, etc.), and;
You find mouse feces in every nook and cranny of your home, and;
You open yourself up to sickness as these mice often carry soft ticks which can quickly take over your home.
All-in-all, they are just a huge nuisance that make clean living in the back country difficult. So, we knew that we needed to take action against the intruders. At first though we were caught in a bit of a bleeding heart scenario... The mice we had seen were extremely cute and reminded us of watching ratatouille.
So, to my wife’s delight and against my better judgement, I started catching these mice by hand with mason jars, relocating them some ways from our home, and then going about my business hoping they wouldn’t return. As you could guess, this did absolutely NOTHING to help us with our problem. The next day we would find more gnawed-through food items, feces, and our spirits would drop just a little more as we knew more extreme action would have to be taken.
Eventually, with little fanfare, my wife gave me the proverbial manilla envelope that said “BURN NOTICE” and I went into action. I figured putting out traditional spring traps would do the trick and quickly set up several in some of the more high-traffic areas we had seen mice scurrying about. What I quickly found out was that the small mice we were dealing with were often not heavy enough to fire the trap, or they would be smart enough to steal the bait without getting caught.
When I did catch a mouse though, they would often be snagged by the tail, paw, butt, etc., which meant that I needed to go and dispatch them... Something I derived no joy from other than the knowledge that there was one less mouse to deal with... and even with that knowledge, there always seemed to be more and they always seemed to be caught alive.
At a loss, we finally hit a point were we mentally gave up and relented to our new reality and room mates... Ironically, when we gave up we started to find dead mice all over our home over a stretch of a few weeks... a time that we now refer to as “The Great Mouse Wars of 2021.” We would find drowned mice in our toilets, seemingly unscathed but dead mice in our couch, and ultimately a mouse that had been drowned in some vegetable oil (yes, the cap was tightly secured and we have no clue how this happened). Despite not being our doing, this drowned mouse was the straw that broke the camels back and we were reinvigorated to up our mouse-eradication plans, and the solution ended up coming from the unlikeliest of places...
At the height of the mouse wars, I took some time off to go and do a seven day guided elk hunt. This was a deep back country adventure on horse back to a series of wall tents that were tended to by an amazing mormon guy named, Lane. Over those days we had to deal with mice coming into camp trying to scrounge up any leftover morsels they could find. Sitting around a fire one evening I mentioned my own ordeal with mice back home and Lane’s eyes lit up and he maniacally explained in a monotone voice, “Mice are never a problem... you just gotta build a high-dive.”
Taking the bait, I asked him what exactly he meant, and without answering he disappeared from the fire for about five minutes before returning with a knife, some wire, an empty gatorade bottle, a five-gallon bucket, and stick. Right before my eyes he punched two holes into the top of the five gallon bucket directly across from each other, put a small hole in the top and bottom of the gatorade bottle, and then ran the wire through everything. This created a horizontal plane for the mice to run on and would spin whenever a mouse would walk on it. The stick he had was used as a gang plank to entice the mice to climb up and onto the empty bottle.
Still not convinced that I was seeing “the best mouse trap known to man,” he took some peanut butter and slathered it all over the bottle. Lastly, he poured about two inches of water in the bucket, put everything near the bear-proof trash can and said... “you just wait till morning.”
As right as rain, the next morning we had five mice who were all peacefully drowned in the bottom of that bucket. It seemed too good to be true, but I had witnessed it with my own eyes. So, when I got home from my trip I went about making my own “mormon high dive,” and saw the exact same results!!
I started stacking up the mice and eventually got to the point where we now enjoy a nearly rodent free existence in our cabin... our contraption is ever present in our workshop and the only maintenance required is to dump the mice and water out every few weeks to ensure that there is room for more. Having gone through the whole gambit of attempts and practices for personal pest control at the beginning of our journey I hope this tip will help alleviate other back country newbies issues with any rodents that become unwelcome house guests!
#thatmouseintheoilthough 😳