Mice

A week ago I went to pick up the coffee mug I’d left in our car when I noticed mouse sprinkles on top. It’s bad enough that mice are hanging out in our car, but I’d rather they didn’t use my coffee mug as a perch.

My glimpses of live mice tend to be as they dash across a trail or down a hole. Occasionally I encounter stunned juveniles that the cats have been batting around the house. Deer mice and white-footed mice are common and populous throughout North America. I can accept that my cats kill mice in the house since that’s the human-cat contract that underlies the whole domestication of cats. However, outside I feel the predators that don’t have their lives catered to don’t need extra competition.

Mice must hide from aerial predators – hawks and owls, as well as mammals as small as the short-eared shrew and as large as foxes, or even coyotes. Mice move under cover of snow and night. In the morning tracks appear on the snow surface, moving from woody cover to woody cover. Snow melt exposes their long tunnels, still roofed or collapsed into trenches. While some larger-bodied rodents such as chipmunks lie in torpor underground next to their personal food stash, mice are out searching for edibles to stoke their internal fire.

Smells don’t travel as well in the cold, yet our woodland mice sniff out seeds, insects, and sometimes small dead bodies for sustenance. They found the bag of grass seed carelessly left in the shed and left a mess of husks and mouse sprinkles. We should have known better, but then we stuff our lives full of tasks while mice have the long winter night to focus on a few essentials.