First, I must get this out of the way — I tried live-catch so-called ‘humane’ traps; they seem not to work, or take an extraordinary amount of effort. You can try them .. I did, they weren’t effective, I moved on.

I’ve been pretty successful so far in catching the little buggers, so heres my thoughts in case anyone is having a similar outbreak in these getting-cold months.

Activities you need to do:

• block entrances into your home from the outside; this serves several purposes .. it stops or slows this invasion; if done right, it stops _future_ invasions; and my favourite — it divides the enemey; those outside, and those inside. I prefer to look at it the same way Rorschach looks at other inmates (in the Watchmen graphic novel.) You’re not trapped with mice .. they’re trapped with you
• eliminate the rodents; ie: you can kill them or contain them and release them elsehwere; whatever works for you, but they must be dealt with. Mice breed quickly, so I figure you got to get them quick, or suddenly theres more; if you catch all but 1, you’ll have 4-10 more in a month or two!
• control and maintain; keep your garbage bin outside the garage (the smell carries!), though it then turns into a problem with other scavengers :/ leave pellet baits around, or gnawable blocks, etc, in key areas and check them on occasion .. so you can see if they’ve been taken or gnawed on, and thus know there is more work to be done. Vigilence against this enemy!

I’m no expert at any of these, but here is some insight..

Detecting:

• I’m paranoid about every little sound now; any creek drives me nuts.. *Sigh* Still, a ‘thud’ noise is more likely rain or drips from a toilet than a critter. A little scraping running noise, or a grating as they chew on wood or a pipe (yes, they will eat through a copper pipe!) is an indicator though. If you hear scampering in your attic, you know something is in the walls and up there.. go freaking get it! Putting your ear up against a wall and you’ll hear piles of weird noises (no idea what they are myself, but they’re not mice.) Mostly I imagine you’re hearing your own blood rushing around in your body, or drips from the pipes. My satellite dish blows in the wind and creaks, fraked me out until I realized what it was etc. Seems like 99% of the noises you’ll hear are normal. Mice are tiny, dont’ weigh much.. they’re not going to make much noise.
• Running/climbing/scrabbling on raw drywall, now that will make a noise; chewing or digging or rooting around, yes. Climinb insulation.. no. So if you hear them, they’re probably up to no good. If you don’t hear them, they’re in the insulation or something quiet like that!
• Droppings of mice look like black squishy grains of rice, but smaller than a small rice grain. If its powder, its soot or something. If its squishy, and in a suspicious area, coudl be mouse poop; apparently they eat frequently, and poop mega frequently, so thats at least one thing to make our lives easier.. detecting them is possible. Look in your furnace room (usually unfinished right, and thus having easy access from when they’re in the walls or floors) and if you see some tiny bits of poop there you go, you’ve got an issue.
• I first noticed them under the sink, from grating noise as they chewed on the little tiny garbage can we keep there. I mean _kept_ (nolonger! no more wet garbage in the house, stop interesting them!) Anyway, they were coming in through the square opening the round pipe was coming in from, meaning they were in the floors (and thus walls, attic, etc.) We never got much evidence they were in the house proper until I really syarted looking … around furnace, fusebox (also an unfinished area), etc. But mostly they don’t have good access into the house proper, since you patch up any holes right? They’ll come wandering fore sure though, so as soon as you detect them.. terminate them!

Blocking:

• Fill holes; apparently white crackfiller is no good, but this yellow expansion foam seems to work well — they don’t seem to short term eat it (and my favourite — if they do eat through some foam, you’ll see the tunnel they made and thus have more information and evidence.. you know they’re there, and thus can bait and trap!) I’ve used yellow Great Stuff. Its one use, but sometimes you can scrape off the dried goo and get another run .. you can use a drinking straw as another applicator, since the first is certainly only one-time use.
• For larger holes or filling soffet entrances etc, you need support; for something more permanent, too.. buy steel wool at Home Depot or whatever, and spray the foam all over _that_ — its tough, and they cannot chew through the steal and stay healthy, thats for sure. The steel wool provides a surface foir the foam to stick to.
• They’ll eat through duct tape and such but it does serve as a good indicator, again. (Aside .. did you know “duck tape” is also_ correct? Look it up.. its a very interesting story.)
• Go through all exterior surfaces, including your garage or other access points; check around your steps, around the outside foundation of your home .. look for cracks and holes, and patch them up. Even the ‘weeping holes’ or breathign holes between bricks.,. in my house they’re far enough apart you can stick a finger into them sometimes, and you know a little bugger can climb on through!
• Cut off an inch of steel wool and jack it into the hole with a screwdriver; that’ll let the weeping hole breath, and stop intruders (including wasps/etc too.
• Prevention tip (dunno if it works, but it feels wise) — keep all your food in the fridge, or in vary hard to access areas (umclimable due to angles?), or in bins/jars. Pantry seems the most at risk to me since you can’t keep everythign in the fridge, but you can stick most items in the pantry (cereal etc) in bins.

Trapping:

• There are many kinds of traps; I consider (now) a snap-trap (”back break trap”, the traditional wire-on-wood traps you remember from movies as a kid) pretty humane since they generally kill instantly or within a few short moments; occasionally the rodent will get caught as he pulls away and so you get a leg or nose and they drag it around for a bit before they die, or they wait for you to get them; a couple guys I found alive in there with their backs broken, but still alive. That made me feel bad :( Course, they also can chew through wiring and start fires, or pass germs around, and carry fleas and such into your place, so I take that as some consolation
• There are glue traps (”sticky traps”) you can buy sometimes (not often carried in my area?), though some peopel put sticky glue on paper/wood to make their own; these are advertised as being live-catch and humane, which I thought at first.. but it seems pretty cruel; some peopel report the animals chewing off their legs to escape, and certainly they’re not happy there.. will poop themselves, or get glue in their mouth and suffocate etc. But on the other hand, I used a couple of these in spots hard to get at, and was able to poor olive oil on the glue to let the guy go, out in a park miles away. So they do let you rescue some guys safely. *Shrug*
• Electric traps .. a friend of mine reports much success with a simple box you can buy cheap; in essence its a small plastic box with a hole in the end; critter comes into the hole after your peanut butter bait, and when he steps on the right spots.. zap! open the lid, dump the guy, and next. They have a LED on them, so you know when they’ve caught something. (Really expensive units will have a box under them, and automatically dump the carcase in there and can thus do multiple kills in a row.) This is probably just as humane (or more?) than a snap-trap, I figure.
• Tricky traps; some people like to get a bucket, and put a dowel across it, through a popcan. Put bait on the can, and a small stick as a ramp up to the bucket edge.. critter will walk across the dowel to the can, and tip over and fall in the bucket. Evil sons of bitches will put water in the bucket, but hippies will release the guy far away. I didn’t get creative, I wanted to keep my family safe and do the job quickly.
• “Humane traps”; there are a few multi-catch live-catch traps, which might work; ie: theres “tin cat” which is a metal box with a hole on each end, and a little ramp inside the holes; the rodent will walk up the ramp to get to the bait inside the box, and the ramp will tip (like a teeter-totter) and the guy can’t get out. Likewise there are traps that have a rotating door, or traps with a floor that gives way and drops or pushes the guy into a storage area. Some of these boxes have transparent lids. Some will try to sell you optional glue-boards to put on the floor of the trap and thus make the guys stress out and die quick.. but once you’ve got a guy in the box, you might as well derive away and let it go somewhere (if you have a parkland nearby. I mean, if you’re just going to let it go and have it run into someone elses house, you’ve got a mental problem.) Your mileage may vary, but I had no luck with these traps :/
• Toss some cubes or pellets or bait-boxes or whatever in the attic hatch; theres a high chance thats where they’re going to centralize since its safe, warm, lots of insulation for nesting … remember, say it to yourself, “I. am. heavy. predation.” Make them unhappy, and you’ll win.

Baiting:

• You’ll need a good bait; I’ve been told and read that peanut butter (crunchy) is deectable to the mouse; it is also highly delicious to me, so screw them! As I noted above, I bait using “Wilsarin”, a pellet slow acting poison. They can rob my traps, go right ahead.
• Many recommend pre-baiting; let a trap lie around with bait on it, but the trap unset, for a day or two; this lets the mouse get used to it and then you cna get him easy. Mice are fairly careful so just putting a new trap in an area will catch idiot-mice (they have varying intelligences too), but keener mice will avoid it. I’m told rats are _Very_ careful and will avoid anythign new in their known area for a week or more, but thankfuly I’ve not had to deal with those monsters. Pre-baiting does seem to work, but for me .. my traps (Predator snap traps) work very well, but they can still rob them (I think cause the pellets don’t stick to the bait bucket), and so they get a few good nights and they get sloppy and step on the wrong part…..

Poisoning:

• You can buy different kinds of poisons (”rodenticides”) at the hardware store; from pellet kind, to small bricks (harder for the roden to drag away and can be nailed down etc), to bait-boxes (have slots to put the bricks in and keep children/pets out of reach.)
• I use the pellet poison as bate — mice seem to be able to rob it away from traps (since its not sticky), but thats fine.. eat it up boys!
• The little bricks can be secured to an area, and kept in bait boxes; bait boxes make good nests, and keep kids hands away from the poison. A good thing really.. I didn’t use any of these, but should have.
• They seemed to love the pellet poison, so I use it as an indicator .. dropped it in piles around my garage and could thus tell roughly the attack paths, or get hints where they’re coming from or going to. I use it as bait in snap traps or glue boards.
• Theres different kinds of poison.. WArfarin is an early and relatively reliable kind, but has been superceded by a number. They’re all anti-coagulents as I understand it, which dries out the guys; fi they keep eating it, they’ll die. If they stop, and run out and get water somewhere, they may live. So tends to drive them away or kill the stayers, supposedly. I dunno, I was pretty effective with traps so don’t know if this helped or not .. or maybe made them sluggish/dumb/hungry ennough to go for my traps?
• I figure you need to work on all angles, since all options are pretty cheap .. you can’t win a war with just air, you need infanry and navy too :)

Other:

• Buy a cat; I’m allergic to them, but if I wasn’t, I’d think about it :)
• Many cats are not good mousers; thats not the point (not the only point); mice are inherently (and rightly so) afraid of cats…. their smell can drive them away. If you’re kooky, you can borrow cat litter and leave it around suspicious areas.. that’ll scare the critters (and your friends) off. Apparently you can buy bottles of cat urine. (!)
• You can buy ’sonic emitters’ that apparently project sound above our range of hearing, but that mice can hear (mice squeek supposedly, but I’ve not heard it. But apparently thats because they’re so high pitch we can’t hear their whole vocabulary.) Setting these up around your hosue can help, some say.. but government studies seem to suggest only “mostly harmless”; the main issue seems to be, even if they work, that such noise is highly directional, so you can’t just ‘flood the area’ with it.. you end up pointing these things out of your power sockets and shooting audio across the room. It doesn’t penetrate walls, so it only irritates critters who walk across its path.. not a big deal. The good thign is we can’t hear them, so you can fill your house with them and maybe it helps. Some people swear by them.

I’m sure I have lots more tips, but these are some notes; I hope its useful to someone!