Critter jitters
First of all, you will wait a long time for the appointment — so long that the snakes and mice and whatever is making that scratching sound will now have great-grandchildren.
The exterminator finally arrived Wednesday morning. I’d had no warning and, seeing as I’d booked him back in June, I was surprised to look out the kitchen window and see the tall young man in the mirror sunglasses peering back at me.
“What have you got going on here?” the nice man asked as he wiped his feet on the mat. I led him to the scary area in the laundry room.
“It started a couple of months ago,” I said. “I was in bed, and a little mouse ran into the room and then turned and ran back out. I think he was confused.”
Then I told him about finding a dead mouse on a glue trap in the scary space next to the washing machine a few weeks after that.
“And then there was a snake on a glue trap down there,” I said, shuddering at the thought as I extended my fingers to show how large it was. As he peered into the space, I explained how my son-in-law put mesh over the drain and then covered that with a heavy metal plate.
“That’s good,” he said, and then I showed him the space under the bookshelf where I heard the scratching noise.
“I don’t think I was imagining it,” I said, “because the dog is mostly deaf and he ran over to the wall to check it out.” We both looked over at dear old Felipe, asleep in his bed.
“He’s pretty much useless in doing critter control,” I said.
The worker snooped around the house, inside and out, looking for portals. It was nerve-wracking — like awaiting results of a car inspection. As he carried a ladder upstairs to the bedroom to check the attic, I thought about all the possibilities. Did I have a colony of mice chewing through my insulation in the attic? Or worse, rats? Was the scratching in the wall the sound of mice desperately trying to escape my resident snakes? Was I looking at a $4,000 critter-abatement bill?
I am no stranger to significant rodent problems. While living in a Civil War-era farmhouse near North Park back in the 90s, we’d hear scratching in the ceiling. When we prepared the place to sell, the inspector discovered the attic floor was knee-deep with black walnut shells. Squirrels harvested the nuts from our tree and jumped from the branches to our roof. Our attic was their winter store. I expected the same at my condo this week.
As the worker stepped down the ladder and closed the attic hatch, I asked.
“Well, do I have a critter? Or a critter PROBLEM?”
I got a good diagnosis.
“You had a mouse or two,” he said. “But not a mouse problem.”
But even one mouse is too many for such a sissy as I. He suggested I might put some poison bait boxes around the outside of the house. But I’ve heard about what it smells like when a mouse eats the bait, gets sick and goes back inside a wall to die.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. I appreciate that he didn’t try to sell me the bait.
As for the snake? He told me it was probably a baby Eastern milk snake that came up through the drain. Apparently, they are good to have around.
“They eat mice,” he said … though not mine.