Mice 101

By: Marshall Highet
01/06/2023

Sometimes when you have an infestation, you’re dealing with termites, silverfish, or ants, or even a hyper-regional pest like fire ants or carpenter bees. For insect infestation, foams, bait, and liquid treatments are all excellent defenses. However, if you have an infestation of slightly larger pests, like mice, you will need to use a whole other set of tools.

There are a couple of things you need to know about mice, especially if you have some living in your home and they aren’t your pets. Their habits, diet and the ways both a homeowner and a professional pest control specialist deal with a house mice infestation are important knowledge if you will soon be mounting an attack on these crafty rodents.

What Are Mice?

Most are fairly familiar with Mus musculus, or the common house mouse. But here are some facts that you may not have known before about this wily creature:

Mice are born in litters and can reproduce quickly; a female mouse can start reproducing as young as two months of age, and can have as many as 150 babies per year.
Mice are voracious feeders and eat up to 20 times a day; they are excellent jumpers, swimmers and climbers, and have extremely flexible bodies.
A house mouse can produce 40 to 100 units of excrement daily.
Mice teeth grow continually, and gnawing is the only way to keep their teeth in check.
The life of a lab mouse can span up to two years, but most wild mice only live around five months due to predators.

A typical house mouse is small, usually brown and furry. Their tails and bodies are equal in length, and their total length is usually between 5.5” to 8”. They have large ears and eyes, a hairless tail, and usually have lighter coloring on their stomachs and darker fur on their backs.

Mice like to nest in warm, dark places to raise their young. Storage spaces, attics, unused bureau drawers, or boxes and chests are all ideal locations for mouse nests. They also like to line their nests with soft material, like shredded cotton, clothing and newspapers.

Mice are a nuisance, but they also inflict property damage, especially to your electrical infrastructure. They also threaten inhabitants’ health.

Why Are Mice Dangerous?

A mouse infestation can happen almost overnight because of their high reproduction rate. The cost of replacing furniture and housewares that mice ruin by gnawing or urination can grow exponentially.

With their constantly growing teeth, mice need to chew in order to keep down their length. The risk of electrical fires due to mice gnawing on your wires grows the longer you leave an infestation untreated. Even though these mammals may be cute, they are very destructive and can even transmit diseases to humans.

How Do You Identify a Mice Infestation?

There are a couple key clues that will tell you whether or not you have an infestation; all you really need to do is rely on your senses.

If you hear mice in the walls at night (they are nocturnal), you smell or see mouse droppings, or you see evidence of gnawing, you may be dealing with a mouse colony, not just one or two pests that were able to breach the perimeter of your home.

Here is a list of all the signs that point towards a mouse infestation:

Rub marks: When they run along the walls, house mice often leave a faintly oily trail about two to three inches above the ground.
Tracks: A mouse’s front feet will leave four-toed-footprints and their hind feet five-toed footprints.
Gnaw marks: Smooth or rough, often the marks will show the signs of tiny teeth.
Damage: From cereal left out to dead insects stuck to glue boards, mice can and will eat anything.
Droppings: Rod-shaped and pointed, droppings can be either moist or dry and measure ⅛” to ¼”.
Odor: Mice have intensely scented urine, with which they often use to communicate. A lot of mice living in one area will produce a truly awful smell.

Of course, sighting a live mouse is the most reliable evidence that you’re sharing your home with rodents as well as humans. Here’s why mice have such a vested interest in getting into our warm homes.

How Do Mice Get In Your Home?

There are four main ways mice enter a house: through the garage, the sewer lines, vent holes, or walls and windows.

The easiest way that mice enter your home is through an open garage door. Especially if your garage is attached to your home, leaving your garage door open is an open invitation for rodent visitors. Even if you’re working outside, it’s a good idea to keep your garage door closed to deter entry.

You wouldn’t believe how well a common house mouse can swim; they are quite skilled swimmers, and it’s not uncommon for mice to come out of your sewer lines. Keep your drain pipes capped to prevent this from happening, and carefully guard vulnerable areas like where a toilet or sink is waiting to be installed.

Vent holes for dryers and other appliances are other easy entrance points for mice. But you can’t just get rid of the ventilation portion of your appliances if you want them to work well. However, you can add a screen to keep pests like rodents out.

The unique body structure of a mouse lets it fit through many unusually tight spots. Any small crack, gap or hole, even if you can’t imagine a mouse fitting through, is fair game for a small rodent. And why wouldn’t a mouse want to take up residence in your house? It’s warm, and there’s plenty of food and water.

What Can the Homeowner Do?

There are a few things you can do to deter rodents from becoming the newest uninvited member of your household. Small actions like repairing damaged screens and storing firewood at least 20’ away from your home can make a big difference in terms of pest prevention.

Here are some great tips that don’t involve a professional exterminator:

Repair damaged screens, including windows and doors.
Store firewood well away from your house. Often mice will make their home in a wood pile if they can’t get into the warm confines of a human house. If you put your woodpile too close to the house, the mice can easily make the jump from one place to the other.
Store food in sealed containers, so the aroma does not attract rodents. This includes dry goods like flour or cornstarch, as well as the more aromatic items in your pantry.
Check the exterior of your home for any holes or gaps, and seal them up with caulk and steel wool, or a combination of the two.
Eliminate leaky areas, as they offer rodents free access to water — one of the main things they look for in a living situation.
Put door sweeps on all outer doors leading to the exterior.
Don’t let full trashbags build up. And if you do have an excess of them, invest in a trash can with a sealable lid.

Basically, maintaining a tidy, crumb-free home will be the best prevention you can use against rodent infestation. Wash your dishes immediately after you use them, and never leave dirty dishes out overnight.

If you start hearing noises in the walls, or seeing mouse poop in drawers and cupboards, you should call in a professional immediately,

What Does a Professional Exterminator Do?

If you’ve heard mice scurrying around your walls at night or have found gnaw marks on your baseboards, you should hire a professional immediately. The longer you wait to deal with an infestation, the worse it becomes. An infestation will not magically get better if you ignore it.

The first step to any full-scale assault on a mouse colony is to seal all the entry points to your home. There’s no point in exterminating the mice you have if new mice can move in a month later. All the previous access points should be inspected and sealed, if needed. Many pest control services use patented foam and other products to make your home a fortress against rodents.

Once a pest control service provider has made sure that new mice won’t be getting into your place, they can start getting rid of the mice you currently have. Most of the time, professionals use traps — either humane or lethal ones.

Humane traps: The point of humane traps is to leave the mouse alive while still trapping them. Then the exterminator will release them into the wild, far far away from your neighborhood. Well ventilated, humane traps have a door that is triggered once the mouse is lured into it.

Lethal traps: These types of traps use the same methodology — an attractant and a trigger — but the mechanism results in the mouse’s death. Both types of traps need to be checked often to make sure that any mouse, live or dead, does not sit in the trap for long periods.

If you’re having an issue with mice that has escalated into an infestation, you need a professional to help. At Home Pros is a great way to cut the response time to your infestation; simply contact our professionals to be connected to reputable, local pest control service providers in your area.