When winter and drought are at bay, the mice will play

Conditions are ideal for a population boom

The mouse traps at Montville Hardware are flying off the shelves.

“We’ve been going crazy with mice stuff,” the store’s owner, Shaun Tine, said Thursday, standing in front of a shelf stocked with sticky traps, mouse poison, snap traps and electric deterrents. “I’ve been selling everything, across the board.”

A mild winter and the end of a drought this spring may have led to better-than-normal conditions for white-footed mice, the most common local species, to thrive, multiply and cause problems in people’s homes and cars.

While state wildlife experts don’t track mice populations, state officials say they have noticed an uptick in calls from the rodents’ human neighbors wondering how to keep them out of places where they can chew wires, leave droppings and build nests.

“Their population tends to cycle a little bit,” said state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection wildlife biologist Jenny Dickson. “You can usually tell based on the calls.”

“Certainly from our own experience ... it’s been a good year for mice,” she added.

Matt Emilyta of Montville said Thursday outside the hardware store that he considered getting a cat this year because of the influx of mice into his basement.

“They’re sneaky,” he said. “And they’re hard to catch.” He’s held off on adding a feline to the family, though, because his dog might not like it.

“That wouldn’t go over well,” he said.

White-footed mice, which breed two or three times a year, enjoyed a fairly warm winter and a break in the drought right before the growing season for their favorite foods, Dickson said. The drought meant little snow over the winter, and heavier

rainfall as spring came around was good for the berries and seeds that mice and other small mammals thrive on, she said.

“There’s just a lot of food around,” Dickson said.

A lot of food means a lot of mice, which has meant a lot of business for Pennell’s Auto Center in Montville, owner Joe Pennell said Thursday.

“What we usually find is when winter starts, to look under the hoods for mice,” he said. “But we’ve had just as many problems in the summer this year.”

“It’s rampant this year, like no other year,” Grace Hutchings chimed in from the shop’s front desk.

Pennell said fixing the damage mice cause could be costly, depending on where they decide to nest.

And, he said, there’s no guarantee that the mice won’t come back once they’ve been removed. A nest in one customer’s car this summer caused the timing belt to slip and do thousands of dollars of damage to valves in her engine. A month after Pennell’s fixed the damage — and removed the gruesome remains of the mice — the woman was back a second time with the same exact problem and another several thousand dollars in damage.

Pennell said there isn’t a sure-fire way to keep mice from inhabiting the nooks and crannies of cars.

“There’s all kinds of old wive’s tales,” he said. “Mothballs and nylons and everything. Does it work? I don’t know.”

Dickson said preventative measures can be more effective than traps: keeping birdseed out of the house, sealing up holes and installing tight-fitting screens.

But, she said, mice can almost always find a way in.

“They’re pretty wily, they’re pretty creative,” she said. “If there was a good solution, I would have used it by now.”