SUCCESS!!!!!
My friends, we have turned the corner in the mousey war.
On Friday afternoon we received 3 additional havahart traps from Amazon.com. Unlike the one from the hardware store, these new traps actually spring shut with provocation. Blame manufacture error for the first trap, or the fact that it was sitting on the shelf too long. Anyway, we set the new traps on Friday night, and by Saturday morning we had two round little mice in our clutches! And a lot less poop in our drawers!
We transfered the mice to our big ferret cage, a challenging task considering how fast these little suckers are. Seriously, they can run faster than you can see them run. But we got them into the cage all right where they stayed for the next two days to wait out the thunderstorms outside. The smaller mouse spent the entire two days hanging upside down from the roof of the cage, while the bigger one hung out in a toilet paper tube for the duration.
On Monday morning I took the mice to our local farm (2.5 miles away) to release them into the woods. I had mixed emotions about letting them go. They're so gosh darn cute, and their safety is not very well ensured in the wild. They are wild animals however, and when I saw them scamper out of the cage and into the woods I felt the greatest sense of joy at their newfound freedom. Then driving away in the car I felt so much relief that the little critters were back in God's hands and out of mine. As much as I love watching the little creatures dash around their cage, I'm feeling a bit burned out with trying to mother the whole world.
Last night Dan caught two more mice, and they are (unfortunately) even cuter than the previous pair. These ones are more friendly than the previous duo, and from where I sit I can see them leaning against each other in the cage. (In desperate fear?) Yes, these mice are perhaps the cutest little brown spotted rodents I have ever seen. But I'm afraid that we can't get any more than two in the big cage without having the others escape, and that limits our ability to both keep pets and clear our kitchen of feces. So sadly, these too will soon need to go to the big farm in Carlisle.