Mice. Did I mention that they are not my favorite inhabitants of Owl Acres? Along with the field mice, we have that ubiquitous invader from Europe; those little gray mice with naked tails—the house mouse (Mus musculus). They’re not living in the house, but they have been in the shed where they literally destroyed the electronics of several items that were in long-term storage there.
This little beasty was imported from Europe with early settlers, and has moved into dwellings of every kind, from large commercial buildings, to sheds and houses, barns and bins. Their naked, scaly tails identify them, along with their grayish back and belly. They’re happy to live inside year-round if given a chance. The house mouse loves to be around people, and makes its nest of shredded paper, cloth, and other materials we leave lying around.
Their reproduction rate is amazing, as we all know. A female can raise ten litters of up to 9 (average 5) pups per year. That’s 50 to 90 baby mice per female. Yikes! She does it by becoming fertile mere hours after giving birth, and gestating a new litter while she’s nursing and raising the one before. No wonder she doesn’t live more than a year! Aren’t you glad you’re not a female house mouse?
A collective of mice is known as a mischief of mice. Now why would that be? My partner Bryan has an idea about that.
We had a bumper crop of black walnuts last fall, and Bryan couldn’t bear to let the squirrels have all of them. He picked up a couple milk crates worth, hulled them, and set them aside in the garage waiting for a winter day when we could crack and pick them.
One day when he was checking the oil in the Buick, Bryan found some of those walnuts on the car’s engine block. Each one had two neat holes drilled in it. Now how did that happen? And here is what looks suspiciously like a mouse nest under the hood as well. Mice!
Surely the same mouse that made the nest couldn’t have drilled into those nuts and carried them straight up the slippery metal of the car to place them there under the hood. And yet, who else would have done it?
Now mice are little critters. A fat one would weigh about one and a half ounces. A walnut weighs half an ounce by itself. That’s about a third of the mouse’s overall weight. The walnut is also about an inch and a quarter in diameter, and the mouse is about two and a half inches long. How could this little mouse carry a walnut from the floor to the top of the car engine when the walnut is half as big as the whole mouse? I suppose it’s equivalent to a 200-pound man carrying a bulky 70-pound pack up a cliff—in his teeth.
Winter came, and winter went. We monitored the vehicles for mice. It was too cold to work in the garage on the antique tractor that Bryan was restoring, so the tractor stood with its cylinder head, oil pan and side panels off waiting for a warmer day.
The nut-eaters were busy though, carrying nuts to the top of the tractor, taking a bite out of each, and, unbeknownst to Bryan, dropping them down into the cavities of the cooling system.
New tractor parts arrived, and one fine spring day, he got started. He cleared off all the nuts he could find and installed the new cylinders and sleeves. Then he put on the new head gasket, put the cylinder head in place, and tightened it down. Then he went to supper.
The next morning, a new walnut rested comfortably way down there in the water outlet of the cylinder head. Now how do you get a round object out from deep in a cast iron labyrinth? Maybe, pliers? No room. Maybe fingers? No way. How about a wire coat hanger? You can poke at it, jiggle it, worry it, and maybe, just maybe, tease it around until the mouse holes that the rodent chewed in the nut were upright. Easy, easy, careful, there! Now carefully, very carefully, hook the end of the wire into the hole and oh so gently so you don’t drop it—oops, there it went. Try again. And again. And hurray, it’s finally out where you can grab it. But now what’s this? Chewed up rag bits to make a nice cozy nest in there. Seriously, can a mouse carry a walnut like that? Apparently so. And can a mouse drill into that hard shell to get at the nut inside? Again, apparently so. There’s no evidence of any other critters in the area.
Bryan thought he’d better make sure there weren’t any more nuts in the tractor engine. So, with a flashlight and a mirror, he peered into the labyrinth, hoping against hope that he would find nothing. But there it was, another walnut. It was much deeper in this time. Maybe he could fill the cooling system with water and float it out? Yes, walnuts float. No, it didn’t float out. All he got for his trouble was a mess on the floor. There was nothing left to do but take the cylinder head back off so he could get at the nut. The cylinder head for this tractor is very heavy cast iron. He had rented an engine hoist the first time to take it off and put it back on, and now he was going to have to do it all over again. With the cylinder head off, he was able to harass the nut until it fell out the bottom. Fortunately, there weren’t anymore nuts in there. Only the beginnings of yet another nest made from chewed up bits of rag. By this time, we were convinced that, indeed, a mouse could carry those nuts wherever it wanted to.
And the mice? After the crates of walnuts were removed from the garage, they started chewing multiple holes in the walnuts they still had stashed under the work bench. We cleared everything out of the garage including those crates of walnuts. Now we just need a cat.
Photo by: W.A. Djatmiko
