For the last couple of months we have had a bit of a rodent problem. Not inside, but in the attic space.

It seems that as the season cooled they have been making their home in the wool insulation in the attice. Their trails wander all across the wool, so this probably isn’t the first year it has happened, although I don’t think this is related to our last major event.

This time they are some kind of mouse, possible a forest mouse or something similar. But anyway, so far our garden has a collection of about 20 of them. But we couldn’t really figure out where they were getting in. The obvious answer is that they were getting up under the weather boards and climbing up the inside of the walls. But over the last year or we put chicken wire netting up under all the weather boards, so that should have stopped them.

Or so we thought. Getting back to the present time, it is winter now and with winter comes snow. And the snow is very good for collecting footprints. Just today outside we saw prints from cats, dogs, rabbits, squirrels, stoats, and deer. And across the yard leading to and from the back porch were a little set of mouse sized prints. And they were also leading to and from the bird house. So not only are we giving them shelter, we are feeding them too.

I was sure that we had blocked all their possible entrances, but anyway it was worth checking the back porch again. So I pulled up a few of the boards from the terrace, closest to the house. And under one of them I found a nice little collection of sunflower seed shells. And after a bit more checking it turns out rhat the only place without chicken wire netting is around the back porch. So now there is.

Unfortunately that probably means that there are some now trapped in the attic. But that is what the traps are for…