Okay, couple of things, as I respond to myself with such class.
Those “mice” that Gerald caught were actually VOLES, an animal I know AB knows about.
And the reason the house was over-run by voles does have something to do with....MOLES!!
See of all the ways to kill moles....juicy fruit, poison pills, even great big traps that would horrify me to have to empty....the BEST....the absolute BEST way to get rid of moles?
THE MOLE “ALARM”.
You buy them at a hardware store, Walmart maybe has them. They are long stick like metal objects. Inside you insert 3 C batteries, then you plunge it into the ground near an active mole run. The thing emits a kind of chatter that is supposed to be some kind of warning to run, danger is about.
Believe me, I know mole runs, where they hide, their bad habits, how my compost spread lovingly around my gardens attracts bugs for the fertility of it and the moles like the grubs.
So anyway....I first bought one...I was skeptical.
Sent the moles in the back yard running....
....into the FRONT yard!
Bought two more of the mole sticks, plunged them into front yard....bada boom....moles all gone.
Now I also, especially in the front yard where I once had a garden fountain but no more, have voles. Little mice fellows that use mole runs rather than drill their own. One might call them welfare recipients but God did make them that way.
So once I put in the devices in the front yard....wow, the voles went nuts. Don’t know what happened to the voles but a bunch of them evidently ran INTO the house, I don’t know how but do any of us know how mice get into our house?
Now I got four cats and every oncit in a while a very dumb survivor-of-the-fittest...NOT....wanders into our home.
They don’t last very long, as you might imagine.
Now CATS are also, let me insert here, the BEST predator for moles. My cats, however, do not go outside but I reserve the right to send Gerald outside at night as a last resort against the moles.
Anyway....we had at least two voles inside the house and I suspect there were more, also signs of many in the garage, again, how they got there I know not.
It was cat hell for an entire day as all four cats, including the 14 year old who’s got few teeth and little energy...stalked the voles.
Gerald pounds on one got in the stereo, another behind the TV....as all other cats sit in envy and anger.
Gerald don’t care. He ain’t even remotely politically correct.
He got TWO mice while no other feline got any.
Gerald has lots of self-esteem.
He’s my boy, only cat ever loved me...big and loud as I am.
Then Gerald will sit next to a running vacuum cleaner and casually wash his paws.
Heh.
Awesome. We got a new cat and he's been catching voles. He like to play with them before dispatching them—sometimes he even lets them go...for later torture.
Voles are the reason I stopped using raised beds. It kept the soil so fluffy the voles had no problem digging tunnels and eating everything in the bed. So I went to flat earth. Then I found my plants did better here in the Summer because the raised bed's soil got too hot and dried out in the merciless Southern Sun... In fact, I tried planting my corn in a ditch/depression last year, rather than a raised row, and it actually did better.
So in the long run the voles taught me a thing or two.
Professor Vole, Auburn University:
