Margy's Mouse Mechanism

It's fall and the deer mice in Hole in the Wall are all looking for warm winter homes. When night falls, you can find them running outside the cabin walls, climbing on the picnic table and exploring our wood storage barrels. Wayne and I don't like to kill our animal neighbors, even mice. So we've decided on a catch and release program as ridiculous as it may sound.

We've been very lucky that mice haven't gotten into the cabin and we want to keep it that way. Earlier I shared about using a Havahart live trap to capture and relocate mice. It works fine, but at one mouse a night it could take a long time to get rid of the problem.

One night I couldn't sleep and came up with a brainstorm I call Margy's Mousie Mechanism. With this "better" mouse trap we can capture multiple mice in one night. The design is simple. It starts with a large plastic tub. We have lots of these around the cabin for a variety of purposes. Some scrap lumber was used to fashion a ramp and "diving board" into the tub. A few dabs of peanut butter completes the trap and it's ready to set up on the mouse trail along the cabin wall.

On the first night we caught three mice in one fell swoop. In the morning, they all got a quick boat ride to nearby sandy beach with lots of hidey-holes and natural food sources. A perfect place to build a warm winter home. That's much better than poison or a kill trap for sure. -- Margy