Catch and release

Humans want crumbs removed; mice are anxious to remove them. It ought never to have been a cause of war. 

—C.S. Lewis 

Jack Lewis was soft on mice. The lines above were spoken by one of his characters in That Hideous Strength, but Lewis also wrote in a letter, “I love real mice. There are lots in my rooms in College but I have never set a trap."

I, on the other hand, am not soft on mice, and have set hundreds of traps. I like old houses—the modest bungalow I call Teach Éan was built in 1920, and prior to buying it I lived in rented homes of similar vintage—and I keep birds, which is to say I maintain a constant supply of bird seed, so Lewis's "war" never ends. But if Mus musculus is an enemy in a battle for the integrity and livability of my home, the species is also a resource to be harvested. I have kept not just redtails and kestrels, but also a sharp-shinned hawk and a merlin (both normally bird-eating raptors) fed partially on a diet of house mice.

So it seemed nothing out of the ordinary when, working in my office this evening, I heard one of the snap traps in the kitchen go off. Approaching, I heard the scrabbling that indicates a misfire: most often, the trap kills cleanly and instantaneously, which is of course the goal, but occasionally a mouse is caught by the leg or tail, and I have to dispatch it myself. Unfortunate, but it happens.

Tonight, though, there were two surprises. Firstly, the mouse was indeed caught by a foot, quite securely but in a way that appeared to have left it uninjured. Secondly, it was not a house mouse but a deer mouse of the genus Peromyscus. The two common species are (or were) the white-footed mouse P. leucopus and the deer mouse proper, P. maniculatus; now I find that while I wasn't looking the deer mouse has been taxonomically split into eastern (maniculatus) and western (sonoriensis) species. I've never become adept at identifying them beyond genus, so I'll stick with the generic "deer mouse" for now.

This was a surprise simply because I live in a densely-settled neighbourhood in town; while I frequently encounter deer mice out in the countryside, especially while hawking (though, oddly enough, Stekoa has yet to catch one this season), I've never seen one here before despite plenty of time working with Jessa in the garden.

At this moment, there is a Ziploc bag full of deer mice in my freezer, a gift from an acquaintance who traps them at his place out in the county; a kind man, he feels better about passing them on to me and my hawk than letting them go to waste. The bag is likely full of hantavirus and Borrelia as well, but I don't let that bother me; they'll make good summer rations for Stekoa, and I'll try to be conscientious about washing my hands.

But this evening's mouse will not be joining them. She was unhurt, after all—I say she, though I didn't check; the mouse just left an impression of softness and femininity—a gorgeous creature, reddish-brown above, white below, with big dark eyes. I'm a sucker for big dark eyes. And though I've never seen one here before, I'm delighted that there is at least one (very lucky) deer mouse in my prairie garden.

Related post: Deer mice