Caught a mouse!

About a week ago while I was cooking something or talking on the phone I thought I saw a little mammal skit across my kitchen floor. Probably a mouse, I guessed, and sure enough, in the next few days I started noticing signs of mouse co-habitation. No, it didn't nest in my couch or do any other damage (AFAICT). There were the semi-creepy noises coming from the chest-of-baskets and from my daily compost bucket - but I never saw the source of these poltergeist sounds. Then I found mouse poop in one of the baskets and I laughed a little, thinking, "Oh, so it's my turn now."

But Mr/Ms Mouse (say, what are mice's pronoun preferences?) revealed their hiding place when s/he tried to drag a bit of toilet paper into a gap behind the tiles above my stovetop. With the hiding place exposed, I hatched a plan to catch the little squatter.

Like in a caricaturized mousetrap, I set little cubes of cheese along a path to the far end of an ice cream tub lid, which teetered on the edge of the kitchen counter over and old pool chlorine bucket.

Hipster ice cream - not just vanilla

Within a few minutes of my first trap, I heard a thunk and felt so proud that my humane trap had worked so perfectly. It was so easy. Too easy. As I turned around to open the back door, I heard another, softer thunk and already half-knew what had happened: the mouse had simply jumped out. Must have been gathering its strength for a minute and then bounded out. Or maybe it ran around the perimeter fast enough that it could stick to the side walls and escape with a gravity-defying parkour stunt. I wish I had seen it.

Luckily I have taller buckets too. My second trap worked just as well overnight, and didn't yield to the mouse's parkour prowess. By the time I got up, the mouse had found its way into the bucket again, and this time I was able to convey it outside. It learned to fly as I tried to make it my neighbour's problem, but the universe conspired against my subterfuge and I mis-timed the release, and the mouse landed on my side of the wall. I haven't seen or heard it since, though, so I'm sure it's telling all its buddies at the mouse bar about that one time that an alien abducted it.