Mighty mouse?

[alan refail]

Another mouse thread.
I think I have a mouse in the polytunnel - never seen any evidence of any before yesterday. It had been busy on the bench, but rather than eating the peas coming up in modules, it had concentrated on eating two small immature green peppers, carefully leaving the seeds. It had also been on the ground and had carefully eaten along the whole length of two discarded cayenne chilis (fully ripe and hot). If I ever find it I'm sure it'll be breathing fire

[The Mouse]

Yesterday I couldn't work out what some small black lumps on the shed floor were. They looked like soot, but weren't.
Today, the OH came in brandishing a new mop that had only been in the shed for the week, and showed me its handle - the rubber grip had been nibbled away! Mystery solved.

It turns out that they've also started eating the onions and the one box of potatoes I was storing in there.

Luckily, it does only seem to be mice in the shed at the moment, not rats. I'm just hoping we can keep them out of our other outhouse, where most of my crops are stored!

[Primrose]

They obviously wanted the rubber material for their nest. They're quite fussy about their nesting material. In our last garage infestation we found that they'd pulled all the lambswool fur off our paint decorating rollers. They'd chewed their way through the polythene wrapper of a new one which we'd bought but not yet used and nibbled it until it was virtually stripped bare. All the baby mice we found were nicely snuggled up in a cosy lambswool nest. Which just illustrates how much damage they can do. I read in the paper today that an airline recently had to ground an aircraft twice because a mouse had been spotted in the cabin. After having seen what they did to the wiring under my car dashboard when the car was stored in the garage, there's no way I'd want to fly on an plane that hadn't been thoroughly checking for mouse/wire chewing damage.