Moths and Mice: It’s You or Them By BOB TEDESCHI
It could have been worse. At least we weren’t scared for our lives. A friend recently told me that she once pulled open her dishwasher to find an enormous black snake staring at her. She returned the dishwasher door to its closed position and, somehow, remained standing. Later, she and her husband found an identical snake dead in the road in front of their house.
The story put my rat war into perspective, but it also gave me an idea for ending the turf battle in my current home, between myself and mice.
Why not a pet snake?
Before inflicting that idea on my wife, I called on three people with, presumably, more conventional suggestions for mouse combat. I also asked their counsel on how to stop other common food-seeking pests — moths — from invading my kitchen every few months.
My advisers were Bob Young, an operations manager for Terminix, the pest control company; Andrew Lopez, owner of the Invisible Gardener, an online organic pest control firm; and Travis Poore, a garden specialist at Home Depot.
Their advice: Neither problem is hard to solve if you react quickly, spend $20 on the right items, and follow the proper steps. If you want to avoid killing anything, you will pay a good-karma premium, but you can still succeed. If you don’t act fast, you will need to spend much more on an exterminator.
Or a hungry snake.
Let’s start with moths, because they’re easier.
Mr. Young said the typical kitchen plays host to two types — the Indian meal moth and the Mediterranean flour moth — and they are in your kitchen because you put them there. You buy them at the grocery store, you drive them home, and you deposit them in your cupboards.
They’re not moths at this point, but rather moth eggs, carried as stowaways in boxes of pasta, flour and grains. When they reach your cabinets, they hatch and reproduce.
If you want to get rid of many or most of them, regularly pour your pasta, flour, cereals and grains into sealable containers, and throw away the packages that are often the sites of the eggs. There still may be moths, but far fewer than otherwise.
My wife has adopted a different strategy. Since we are either too disorganized or too lazy to systematically transfer our food to sealable containers, we accept the fact that the eggs will hatch. Then we put a pheromone-based trap (I used Safer’s Pantry Pest, about $10 for 2) in the pantry. It attracts the moths as soon as they hatch, they die before they can lay more eggs, and we’re fine until the next stowaways arrive.
Mice are more complicated.
Once you have discovered mouse droppings, don’t rush into warrior mode. Instead, employ a little wishful thinking, and consider the possibility that the droppings may be years old. Decades, even.
Thoroughly clean the area with disinfectant.
Next, during daylight hours, head to the basement and look for cracks of outside light. Imagine, above each crack, a little “Welcome Mice” sign. When you are done, check other likely areas in the house for entry cracks, like back doors or, in apartments, common walls.
Then take a really good flashlight (Dorcy’s L.E.D. is about $8), and scour the basement as well as the rest of the house for droppings or nests. Clean all the areas you find, again with disinfectant, wait a day or so, and return. If you have led a righteous life the areas will be pristine, and you can skip to the step of sealing the cracks.
If you have atoning to do, like me, you will find more droppings. Perhaps the droppings will be closer to a half-inch long, and you will have to prepare for a rat battle. If they are a quarter-inch or less, though, they are only mice droppings. Count your blessings — and don’t worry about counting the mice.
“You’d go after one just like you’d go after a dozen,” Mr. Poore said. “And always assume you have more than you want to have, because they reproduce very quickly.”
If you are not troubled at the idea of killing mice, buy some snap traps (Victor brand, $2 for 2, are common). Set at least one trap in every place you found droppings. Mr. Poore and Mr. Young both prefer peanut butter for bait (Jif 18-ounce jar, about $3), since the smell lingers longer than that of cheese.
Hardware store employees will show you how to set the trap, but it’s worth practicing, with two simple rules in mind. Place the bait before you set the trap, and once it’s set, handle it from the side that is opposite the bait. Your fingers will thank you.
Set and reset the traps for a few days at least. Sometimes the bait vanishes, because the mouse isn’t big enough yet to trigger the trap. Keep feeding it.
If you kill a mouse, dispose of it in a tightly closed plastic bag to keep flies away.
If the baited traps are untouched for a few days and no droppings remain, your work is done. But if the traps are untouched and there are still droppings, then the remaining mice are avoiding or ignoring the bait.
At this point, poisons are an option, Mr. Young said. (But not in homes with pets, he added, since they might eat the poison or the poisoned rodents. And in homes with children, he said, poisons with tamper-proof packaging should be used.)
Mr. Poore pointed out that poisons can be especially good since they are now made to quickly dry carcasses and prevent rotting smells (d-Con Mouse Prufe, about $2 for 1.5 ounces).
We have pets, so poison was not an option. We also have children who want to name and nurture every animal they come in contact with, so for years we tried “live” mousetraps — baited little rectangular compartments with trapdoors. They rarely worked, and when they did, we needed to drive the mouse to some faraway place, then spend a few ugly minutes at home cleaning the trap.
A far better alternative for no-kill practitioners, Mr. Lopez said, is to get inside the head of your mice. Just as you might use a Beethoven sonata to rid an area of teenage ne’er-do-wells, Mr. Lopez uses an electronic device that emits a sound that mice hate, but people cannot hear.
Cost is the big drawback. The Pest Repeller Ultimate AT, for instance, costs about $50, and the maker, Good Life, suggests placing at least one on every floor of your home.
A cheaper option is to stink them into submission.
My local hardware store sells pine-scented packages that promise to keep mice away (Fresh Cab’s Botanical Rodent Repellent, about $16 for 4 packages). The Web site GrandmasHomeRemedies.com includes testimonials from those who swear by peppermint oil. (The section on “Getting Rid of Mice” is a good resource.)
Mr. Lopez recommended spraying diluted citrus oil. “Just lightly, though,” he said. “Whatever you smell, the creatures will smell it 10,000 times more.”
Once you have killed, relocated or chased away the mice with sound or smell, it is time to seal things up. Mr. Young said small mice can squeeze through cracks that are pencil thin, while the adults can wriggle through dime-size holes.
The quickest and cleanest plug is steel wool (Rhodes American, $4.50 for 12), which is difficult for mice to chew. If you run out of steel wool and have an extra tube of caulk, that works, too.
To deter future mouse incursions, Mr. Lopez suggested buying a female cat, which, he said, hunts more avidly than does a male. I’ve got a female cat, but she spends nights — prime time for mice — in the basement, where her high-volume meowing can’t awaken the house.
The mice clearly understood our arrangement. They ceded the basement to the feline, but claimed the kitchen and our upstairs walls.
Roughly two weeks of snap traps seem to have turned the tide. (I counted at least five or six dead mice.) The Pest Repeller and the pine-scented pouches may have also helped.
If, somehow, mice make their way through the steel wool, through the pine scent, through the ear-piercing whistle, back to my kitchen, it may be time for the nuclear option.
Crazy? Maybe not.
“I’ve got a friend who had a snake in the attic,” Mr. Poore said. “And he didn’t have any problems.”
