The Perfect Mouse Trap

"Mice Cube" -- a perfectly elegant mouse trap.

"A" mouse showed up under our sink last week. A hole in the side of the house for some heating renovation must have let it in.

Good news! We caught it -- or it caught itself -- within a couple hours in a sublimely simple little plastic box trap called a "Mice Cube".

It's sort of like a Havahart trap but smaller & simpler. It's just a smoked plastic oblong box with an inward opening hinged flap in one end. The mouse goes in by pushing up the flap to enter and the flap closes behind. No triggers, no springs, no catches, loops, wires. Just a box and a flap powered by curiousty and gravity. As the beer guys say, "Brilliant!"

So; the mouse caught itself. We didn't want to kill it just for coming into the warmth, so I took it out to the woods and let it loose. (Also simple; just turn the trap over so that the flap falls open. The mouse figures it out in about 0.001 seconds and is gone.) Rinsed the trap out and put a bit more cheese in it just to be sure we got all the mice and waited.

Caught another a few hours later. And another over night. Then two more the next day. Hmmm. Catching one at a time isn't doing the job. Need more traps.

Here's a rub. I'd picked up this excellent little trap a few years earlier and the store where'd I'd bought it was long gone. Tried a local hardware and a building supply and a big box building supply (Home Depot) but no luck. No "Mice Cube" traps anywhere. But they did have alternatives. We wanted live capture but found that didn't limit the number of choices much, if at all.

We ended up getting two different models from Victor, the company with the big red "V" logo that you see on nearly every standard snap-type mousetrap in the universe. We picked the fairly simple looking Victor model M007 and the "Mutliple Live Capture" model M313.

The M007, despite its name and our very best efforts, is not the James Bond of live mouse capture. It's actually a bit of a joke that serves better as a mouse toy and feeder than as a trap. For starters, it provides no way to tell for sure if it has captured a mouse or not. We've discovered that, for a live-trap device, this is a serious drawback.

The M007 has an external door that sort of swings down to do the trapping, as it were, when a mouse steps to the rear of the box. When the door has dropped down there is a clear implication is that there's a mouse captured inside. Unfortunately the implication rarely pans out and the fallen door only indicates what you can see -- that the door has dropped. Usually after the mouse has left the building. With the bait.

We've set two of these M007 devices 3 or 4 times a day for the last week plus. Call it 40 attempts to give the trap the benefit of the low end. Out of those forty or so, we have positively captured and released one mouse with the M007 though the the mice have captured the bait about half the time. That makes the W-L-T for the mice 20-1-19. Everybody say, "eek" or "Go Mice", depending on your team.

During that same period we captured more mice with the single "Mice Cube" trap. (A completely different take on "go mice".)

The other model we tried is also a Victor. This baby looks like some more thought has gone into it. Maybe some actual field testing?

Teh M313 is also a plastic box, though about twice the size of the others. Victor says it can capture three or four mice at a time and this is a feature that we could use. The M313 is semi-translucent so that you can sort of see if there's a mouse inside. That's good. It has a metal ramp and door assembly powered by gravity. More complex than the "Mice Cube" to be sure, but built by Victor, the mouse trap company. The ACME of mouse trap companies. Right?
Nah.

We set up the M313 immediately; diligently following the instructions and the baiting tips that are offered at the Victor mouse trap website. Then we waited.

While we waited the Mice Cube turned up another mouse. Over night the M313 did get a mouse. One. I saw it in there at around four in the morning, but left it to catch another one or two before cat feeding time at 7:00.

(Yes; we have cats. Two. They seem disturbed to know that we have mice.)

At seven I expectantly checked the M313 for more of the family. Alas and alack! The Mice Cube has yet another, but the M313 is empty. (Probably the same guy, right?)

It seems that the mouse had found the achilles bit of plastic in the M313 and had chewed through it. (it was a little tab that sticks down from the top -- to keep the mouse from getting back onto the metal ramp?) I found mouse poo and plastic shavings in the trap, but no mouse.

Victor has a few other live capture traps in its product line, including one called the "Tin Cat." Apparently I know more about cats than they do. We won't be trying that one. Three losers is enough.

Not to be totally negative; the Victor bait tips are useful and they do work -- just not in the Victor traps. Even the one that says just "water".

Good news: our order of four new Mice Cubes arrived today. So simple and excellent.

Better news is that our supply of mice seems to have stopped. But its good to know that we have a stash of perfect traps on hand. Bring it on mice.

The near perfect, certainly elegant "Mice Cube" mouse trap.