It’s been a while since I set up my elaborate set of mouse traps, barriers and surveillance. See this post. Everything has been in place since then, and I enjoyed a few mouse-free weeks after catching the first 3 mice. However, at least one mouse came back, and was wise enough to avoid the existing traps, no matter what bait I used. I tried peanut butter, cheese, bread, bird seed, vegemite and honey. It was time for a new trap.

The new trap

There are plenty of ideas out there on how to build a DIY mouse trap. For example, here’s a big list of DIY mouse traps. A lot of them follow a similar concept: the mouse gets lured into/onto an unstable platform over a large container. The weight of the mouse is enough to make the platform or just the mouse fall into the container. Here’s my version, using bits I had around the house:

There’s peanut butter and cheese on top of the empty toilet roll. If all goes to plan, the mouse should lose its footing on the roll, and fall into the tub.

At first, it looked as if the mouse was well aware that this was a human-constructed trap, and kept its distance. Over the next couple of days, lured by little bits of cheese I put on the ramp, the mouse got more adventurous:

It looked as though again, the mouse was too smart for me.

A critical error

The mouse was confidently strutting around the top of the tub, and carefully examining the food in the middle of the trap from a distance. I thought I was going to have to go back to the drawing board. But then, one morning, I heard some noises coming from the tub…

I had beaten the mouse! I reviewed the night’s footage to see that little mousey had made a critical misstep, and its dreams of spending its retirement in my house were over.