How to avoid a winter mouse in your house
The squeaks, scuttles and visions of small furry creatures rushing through the kitchen can be an unwelcome part of winter – and exterminators say there’s no better time than now to rodent-proof your home.
Mice and rats are heading into homes around the country as temperatures drop.
While they may be cute, rodents can be a health and safety risk in the house.
Fire and Emergency NZ fire investigator Craig Piner said he has been to charred homes where he suspected the cause was due to rodents chewing through wires.
‘‘They chew insulation off and create a hot spot on the wires, which can ... set fire to the house.
‘‘It’s certainly one of the causes we look at when doing fire investigations.’’
Nelson Laser Electrical electrician James Trowbridge said rodents’ appetite for chewing could cause expensive damage, especially when dealing with ‘‘awkward parts of the roof’’.
‘‘Sometimes it’s quite a major to repair.’’
But there are a number of things households can do to deter Rizzo the Rat and Stewart Little moving in.
Auckland’s Smash’d Em Pest Control lead tech Jonathan Simes said prevention was key, and it was ‘‘all about access points’’.
He said wherever the rodents or their droppings were seen, that was their entry point.
‘‘They don’t venture too far away from where they get in.’’
Common entry points were around and below sinks in the kitchen, bathroom and laundry, or wherever there was piping, he said.
Simes said any small holes and gaps around those entry points could be filled with the steel wool available at variety stores.
‘‘Force it in with a screwdriver. That’s blocked; no rodent can chew through steel.’’
For the bigger, square spaces, he suggested small grade mesh of about 5 millimetres. ‘‘Screw it on around the piping to block off the hole.’’
Another common trick for rodents to get into buildings was to jump from foliage onto roofs, he said.
‘‘Keep your trees at least half a metre from the gutter edge.’’
Simes said as well as being good climbers, rodents could jump nearly 50 centimetres, so creating a gap ensured they couldn’t reach.
And if they still broke in, he said ‘‘less is more’’ when it came to baiting traps.
All they needed was the smell of the food to entice them, he said. Dunedin’s Summit Pest Control business owner Adrian Adamson agreed that the biggest thing for control was tree management – ‘‘no overhanging foliage against the roofline’’.
He said when thinking about spaces rodents could sneak through, a mouse could squeeze into a gap as small as a pinky finger and a rat could contort to the size of a thumb. ‘‘Check little areas a rodent can get in.’’
Adamson said people ‘‘underestimate how bad it can become if they don’t get on top of it’’.
‘‘A female mouse can produce up to 12 in a litter in three weeks.’’
A good source of food was a sure-fire way to attract rodents, so Nelson Debug operator Shane Warland said to tackle the garden.
Clean up old fruit dropped from trees and ‘‘keep yards a bit tidier’’, he said.
‘‘And watch what you’re putting in the compost’’ because rodents enjoy the warmth of lawn clippings and food scraps.
‘‘The more food you’ve got, the more mice you’re going to get. They start breeding if there’s plenty of food around; and the numbers can get out of hand.’’