Living in the Land of the Big Cheese

I have been learning a whole lot about mice lately - more than I really care to know.

We thought we had solved the problem of the marauding mice at Pacific Gardens, but now they've come back.

To put this all in perspective, when I first heard that we had rodent guests who had stayed too long at the party, I checked out the internet.

When I typed in, "Mice in Nanaimo", the names of two major local hotels topped the list - so we're not the only ones!

But it hasn't been much fun. We've spent hours filling holes, cleaning, meeting, setting traps, and checking crawl spaces and duct work for entry points.

And then Chad took control of the mouse patrol. He definitely likes to use humour to get his point across.

Chad's our strata council vice president, and as the one coordinating our efforts to get rid of the pesky varmints, dubbed himself mice president (MP).

He was quick to explain that as the royal Mice President he was just a figurehead that oversees everything in this land of the Big Cheese.

He called the group tackling the problem the Rodent Response Team, or the MLA (Mouse Liberation to-the-afterlife Army).

The people responding to questions and concerns from residents were MEOWs (Mice Extermination Outreach Workers).

And if people wanted to contact the MEOWs directly, they could e-mail them at mice@pacificgardens.ca.

With the humour, however, came a detailed plan, and community members willing to carry it out. And it's working!


I just received the first report from the Rodent Response Team logger, Doris.

According to her splendid spread-sheet, 18 of our units have had no sightings of mice, and three have, but only sporadically.

That leaves four with serious problems, and these are being dealt with by having holes blocked to prevent entry, traps, cleaning, etc.

Round one in the fight against rodents!

Kathryn

Mouse in da house

Eeek - we have mice at Pacific Gardens!  Actually, we've always had mice at Pacific Gardens, so you can get off the kitchen chair now.

It's only that we have just become aware as a community that we have several of the little critters living with us.

Folks here were happily - or unhappily as the case may be - dealing with them on an individual basis, before they found out that this was a collective problem.

As usual, we were alerted to it by an e-mail from our intrepid Mia. "I have the distinct feeling that our building is over run with mice. Mice getting ready for a mating spring ritual with babies, " she wrote.

"We need an all out response to get rid of those lovely little creatures and send some to heaven, wherever that may be."

And as usual, that resulted in a flood of e-mail responses.  It seems the mice had infiltrated almost everywhere, all the way to the top floor and down again.

I learned more about mice demise than I had ever learned before.  With traps - wood, dollar store or sticky?  (Wood not good; dollar store effective; sticky effective but icky.)

Peanut butter or cheese?  And when and where to place the tempting tidbits?  One strategy was to place them on a trap a couple of nights in a row before setting them.

Others swore by the mousing ability of cats.  Michelle offered the loan of her feline friend, whose favourite nighttime pastime was capturing the pesky rodents.

Then the heavy-hitters from the Building and Maintenance (known as BAM) weighed in.  People should clean more, keep food in containers, block off all holes where they may enter.

Chad pointed out that while preventative measures were good, they obviously hadn't worked. And since we believed in shared resources, we should buy good traps and loan them out.

The debate raged on while the mice played and people at PGCC borrowed cats, filled holes, bought containers for food, and became fanatic crumb-sweeper-uppers.

The final words of wisdom came from our elder Doris. "I think that mice are a fact of life, at least when you have all the close to nature features that we are so proud to show to prospective residents.

"People who live in the country have always had to use both prevention and control.  But all control measures have their limitations and neither prevention nor control can ever succeed completely.

"We just have to be watchful and use all reasonable measures in their proper context."

And my view of the solution to the mice conundrum? I'm not sure. I don't have any mice in my unit - yet!

Kathryn