my feed room is infested with MICE!!!

[proudchickenmom]

I fortunately, have never had problems with snakes. thank goodness!

 

[aart]

I fortunately, have never had problems with snakes. thank goodness!

@proudchickenmom So where is your feed room in relation to the coop and your house?

 

[Naser]

I use 240 litre wheelie bins, I bought them second hand, They work fine
https://www.ebay.ie/itm/254483625463

 

[Acre4Me]

so I just have to catch a black rat snake, put it in the feed room, and let it eat the mice? sounds a little bit extreme but i will try it. about a week ago i heard a scraping sound coming from above my head in the middle of the night. i looked up and i saw a mouse jump onto my pillow and then crawl under my bed. i totally freaked out and since then i have been terrified of mice... i mean who wouldn't??? it was literally 3 inches away from my nose!!!! I know it is the only one mouse in our house because we set out traps for a week and we only caught one. could that mouse have come up from the chicken coop??

No. The very first thing you need to do in your situation is to get rodent proof containers. I vote for metal ones as nothing can chew through them. I can find these easily at Menards or box stores or farm supply/feed stores. Keep the feed in the bag, no problem with old feed on the bottom or condensation. Buy them once, they will last a very long time. Second thing you need to do is be very clean in the feeding habits, sweeping any and all feed crumbs up and into a covered garbage can. Third, eliminate the cozy hay bales to a non food location. I’m not sure if mice will take and store food In the hay bales, but you may be better off getting rid of or burning the currently infested bales. Once you complete the these steps, then you can move to the trap/kill mode. So, that is where the snake or traps or poison come into play. However, if you were a hungry and no-longer-cozy mouse, what would you do? Find a new place to live, and that is what you are trying to do -convince them your place is no longer home.

 

[Avian Allie]

Glue traps work really well if you have no other options, they are horrible but effective. Sometimes you can catch more than one mouse per trap if the infestation is really bad. We didn’t think to put our feed in mouse proof containers and have had the same problem this year. Word to the wise, don’t put mouse repellant until they are completely dead and gone because they will want to come to your house. Poison will risk your chickens and any local wildlife that eats mice. Borrowing someone’s barn cat and locking him in the shed for a few nights with water(of course let him out in the day) will definitely get rid of your mice. My chickens eat mice occasionally but living across the street from corn fields means there are way too many mice for them. We no longer have mice, I’m pretty sure a snake moved in, which I’d rather non-venomous snakes to mice any day, I don’t know about you. One of the best things for mice is a Kestrel, but they are migrating birds. In the summer if you build a house for one they may come they are too small to eat chickens which makes them the perfect local predator.

 

[Naser]

No. The very first thing you need to do in your situation is to get rodent proof containers. I vote for metal ones as nothing can chew through them.

The bin I put up is used by the waste collection companies in Ireland for many years, no reports of rodents chewing through them. they carry more and easily mobile, if you can buy second hand they are cheap.

 

[Acre4Me]

The bin I put up is used by the waste collection companies in Ireland for many years, no reports of rodents chewing through them. they carry more and easily mobile, if you can buy second hand they are cheap.

Sure, they could work very well, but I would never recommend that a person with an active infestation start with plastic containers - particularly if they have to buy something. It is well known that rodents can chew through plastic. Not usually an issue if cleanliness is performed (sweep up dropped feed, etc), and there is not a current infestation...the mice haven't figured out the food source coming from feed. If they are going to spend some money for containers, then they should go straight to what will absolutely keep out the vermin!

 

[Rooapalooza]

Glue traps work really well if you have no other options, they are horrible but effective. Sometimes you can catch more than one mouse per trap if the infestation is really bad. We didn’t think to put our feed in mouse proof containers and have had the same problem this year. Word to the wise, don’t put mouse repellant until they are completely dead and gone because they will want to come to your house. Poison will risk your chickens and any local wildlife that eats mice. Borrowing someone’s barn cat and locking him in the shed for a few nights with water(of course let him out in the day) will definitely get rid of your mice. My chickens eat mice occasionally but living across the street from corn fields means there are way too many mice for them. We no longer have mice, I’m pretty sure a snake moved in, which I’d rather non-venomous snakes to mice any day, I don’t know about you. One of the best things for mice is a Kestrel, but they are migrating birds. In the summer if you build a house for one they may come they are too small to eat chickens which makes them the perfect local predator.

Please don't use glue traps. They are so cruel. My dad once caught a baby bird in a glue trap and it suffered a lot before it died. He wanted to save it, but couldn't. Nothing with a brain deserves to die that way.

 

[Folly's place]

I agree about glue traps. Awful!
Mary

 

[proudchickenmom]

my house is in a small neighborhood and is pretty faraway from the other houses. the people who owned the house before us had 5 other structures on the property. our chickens live in a sort of log cabin/coop and the feed room is in a separate cabin about 10 feet away with the hay bales and the tractor. the coop and feed room are both closed off from each other so the chickens cant get in. in one of the buildings on our property there are these 2 large metal barrels that the previous land owners used to store dog food (they ran a dog boarding/hound training sort of thing). they have been sitting in this one place for at least a decade, one of them still has a 50 pound bag of dog feed in it. i was wondering if it would be a secure place to store our feed from the mice. the lid is very heavy with no cracks in it and is made of metal. they smell bad and are a little rusted. how should i clean those things?