Exterminators receive high volume of mice calls

While exterminators around the nation’s capital are reporting booming numbers of calls regarding mice, experts are questioning why we’re suddenly seeing the spike.

According to Patrick O’Hara, owner of PestPros Pest Control, a normal summer brings in around five calls involving mice in people’s homes. This year he’s getting as many as five calls per week.

“I just had this discussion with two or three people,” he said. “I just had a discussion with a client yesterday that we did mouse control for. I’m thinking it might be because we had that dry spell.”

O’Hara said, during a normal summer, mice bury themselves in fields and yards where they live on seeds and other food that they forage. They don’t really turn their attention to people’s homes until the first frost of the season, he said.

“Then they go looking for warmer places to survive the winter,” he said, adding that a person’s home is the perfect place for them to hang out, provided they can find an entry point.

O’Hara believes that the extremely dry weather may be playing a role, with the heat and dry conditions pushing mice to find cooler places where they would have access to water, like a person’s basement.

Marc Johnson, an associate professor of biology at U of T Mississauga who is also a director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Urban Environments, isn’t so sure the weather is to blame.

He said it would take a real investigation in order to figure out definitively why more people are finding mice in their homes this year. However, he said it’s not likely as a result of the heat.

“We have a hot stretch in every summer and you don’t hear the same anecdotes,” Johnson said. “It could be that they are living in the attic and it’s darn hot in the attic right now. I think this is more about the natural ecological dynamics of these organisms.”

Johnson said there are two types of mice that are commonly seen in Canadian cities.

One is the European house mouse, also known by its scientific name Mus musculus. It is small and grey or dark brown in colour. The other is the white footed mouse, known as Peromyscus leucopus in scientific circles. White footed mice are native to Canada. They like treed lots, public parks and forests.

He said the increased mouse sightings are more likely related to a booming mouse population than the recent heat wave.