On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 17:34:03 -0600, Lar wrote:

wrote:
My wife noticed mouse droppings in our basement today (we live in
Cincinnati). I am a little bit puzzled because we don't take food
down to the basement, and we don't have mice on the upper floors of
our 2-story house.

How do you know that? Do you think they will have a parade? For the
most part, I've found that mice don't like sweets, but when I left a
plastic shopping bag with a bag of Hershey's miniatures on the floor
in the dining room a week before Halloween, 2 days before Halloweeen
all the little candies were gone. I thought maybe I had eaten them
and not remembered it. In the following year, I foudn about 5 of the
wrappings in corners of the basement. Still haven't found most of
them.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe the
mice are attracted to water -- sometimes we leave open containers
while washing clothes.

OPen containers of water! I fill my washer from a pipe.

I have never had to deal with this type of
problem before, and I am hoping that I can get good suggestions here
as to how to get rid of the mice.. Thanks,

JD

During my slob period, I noticed that mice ate through the bottom of
used microwave popcorn bags. So sometimes I put those blue-green
mouse poison blocks in them and leave them where I think the mouse
might be. I use popcorn with theatre butter. Of course now there is
only one theatre in Baltimore that uses real butter. The rest use
"golden liquid" or some such name.

Well, make sure they are mice droppings. The large outdoor roaches, aka
water bugs, palmetto bugs, tree roach, will have droppings that can be
larger than mouse. They may not be looking for food or water, mice are
one of the few animals that can live their life without actually taking
a drink of water. It/they may just be exploring about the basement
with the food source being something they have stored up themselves.
Mice see poorly and mostly will run along with their whiskers touching
something, like a base board, placing traps along such area or where you
are seeing the dropping should get them easy enough. For bait for the
traps, take your pick on what to use or nothing at all. For mice I don't
use any baits on the traps, though many exterminators I know swear by
wrapping the trigger a couple of times with yarn then two drops of
either vanilla extract or Hershey's chocolate syrup.

Lar