When the cold weather arrives, the mice and rats move inside.
They leave those frigid burrows in the ground and seek warmer environments. Your home becomes your winter shelter. And as if paying their heating bill for them wasn’t enough, you also give them more food than they ever found outside.
Once they feel comfortable, they begin to search for edibles. Before long, they’re invading your cabinets, chewing through food containers and spilling the contents to spread all over the cupboard.
Not only do they leave you a mess to clean up, but they contaminate your food so you can’t eat it yourself.
It usually starts with a sound. As she sits down to watch television, she listens to the faint pattering of tiny feet as one of these furry pests scurries across the linoleum of her kitchen floor. Or she hears the noise overhead when rodents run over her roof.
Then you start to catch movement from the corner of your eye. You think you notice something running along a skirting board. You look up, but at that moment, whatever it is, it hides behind a piece of furniture and is out of sight.
Soon those little calling cards, rodent droppings, are appearing along the walls of your house.
Mice and rats are creatures of habit. They mostly stay close to a wall. They like to run along the skirting board where they find furniture and appliances to hide behind or under, when they see you get too close.
As soon as you see these pests, or signs of them, in your home, it’s time to start treating them before they get out of hand.
Rodents not only dirty your house with their droppings, they also transmit diseases that you don’t want to expose yourself to.
Pest control techniques for rodent infestations come in different forms. You should consider each treatment method and decide which is best for you.
The fastest treatment for mice and rats are poison baits. Place the bait in a strategic location where it will attract the rodent, but not scare off the pest.
Baits work well, but they have a drawback. After the rodent eats the bait, it crawls to die (usually to a spot inside the wall). A day or so later, that corpse starts to stink. The smell turns to stench as the body decomposes.
A decomposing mouse usually stinks for no more than a week. A rat (because of its larger size) stinks two or more times as much.
Another method of rodent control is the proper placement of sticky plates.
Place the board next to the baseboard where you find evidence of rodent travel. The mouse or rat runs onto the board and gets trapped by the glue. For the best effect, fold the board into a tunnel. Rodents see it as a place to hide.
Sticky boards usually work quite well. I once found one that caught a family of mice (a mother and three babies). I also found mouse hair boards where the plague managed to escape.
Rat boards are much larger than mouse boards. During my pest control days, I had mixed results catching rats on sticky boards. I did catch a few but mostly just found rat hair on the boards.
It seems that the rats are strong enough to break free of the glue.
The mechanical traps work well and you have a large number of options.
Some are catch and release that catch the rodent alive, and you take it far from your home to release it. Some are single-use ones that trap and kill the pest, and you throw the trap away and everything after it catches the first rodent.
I prefer the old spring bar type trap (when using a trap) because of its multi-use ability. Catch a rodent, remove it from the trap, and continue using it to catch more pests.
Which method you use is a matter of personal choice. The important thing is to learn how to correctly place the treatment you choose and quickly control the invasion of rodents.
You may enjoy that tiny foot sound, but not when it comes from mice and rats.