Sassy cats – Mice, more mice and decomp

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Morgan is exhausted after 10 straight days of mousing.

This has been a busy week for the cats. Specifically the grays – Morgan and Gracie. Mollie is retired from anything remotely looking like work and Hazel is an observer when she isn’t napping from exhaustion from observing.

If you remember from Sunday’s post, Morgan caught two mice. There were no survivors. She said they accidentally died during questioning.

During this week there were more. At least four more who ignored our Bates Motel no vacancy sign and lived to regret it. Well, not all of them lived. I caught two with my trusty deli cup and piece of cardboard (patent pending). Those lived just not in the house. Morgan killed one outright (she says it had a heart attack).

Gracie was too excited to be of any use. At one point we collided and I missed catching the mouse because she was “indaway.”

There is another dead mouse and I can’t find it. How do I know? Decomp. I can smell decomposition at 50 paces thanks to my overachieving nose. (I watch too many crime shows so I know all about decomp.)

During the summer there was decomp smell on the porch for a few days. We have shrubs and ground cover planted around the porch. I looked but couldn’t find it. About a month later I was cleaning up branches and found a desiccated bird. It probably wopped the side of the house and broke its neck, falling into the ground cover to breathe its last breath.

We have moved furniture that hasn’t moved in years, but haven’t found anything. (This isn’t easy as the beloved husband’s nose can only smell brownies baking and is no help locating the dead mouse.) 

We did find 87 catnip mice with dust fuzz all over them and an inch of dust.

The last two nights Morgan has slept upstairs (a good indication there is nothing alive in the basement except spiders). I would suggest if anyone wants to visit, wait a few days. It’s a small thing so it doesn’t smell as badly as a decaying human body (or so I’ve learned from TV).  So far we have not found any dead humans either.

We have air fresheners going but I can still detect it. Then again, few people have a nose like mine.

Hazel: Is it done? Are they gone? Is it suppertime?

 

74 thoughts on “Sassy cats – Mice, more mice and decomp”

  1. It’s been a while since we experienced that odor, but just thinking about it I can conjure it up! It’s like no other! With Morgan and Gracie being so good at guarding their territory and taking care of the little “problems,” they must be really annoyed that they let one get by! 😦

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    • It could be. It’s becoming a nightly ritual to catch mice. My husband is talking about an exterminator but I’m not sure what the point is. Because I have cats I won’t allow bait or those sticky traps where they starve to death. Our house is relatively new and we haven’t found many places where they can get in. Butting up to our back yard is a water retention pond that rarely has water. Our township takes care of it. Instead of regular mowings, they scalp it 2 or 3 times a summer right down to the dirt and the last one was about 2 weeks ago. I think the mice moved up to the houses once their habitat was leveled. We never had mice until last year.

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  4. This is the time of year that they are moving in, finding a cozy spot and telling their friends and forming condo associations! At my sister’s farm last week she caught one under the sink … there was evidence of them in the garage, near the haul from her garden. Little buggers.

    Catching/killing Mice in the fall can be a full time occupation!!

    Cheers!
    MJ

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      • blah! One time Hubbs didn’t believe me (farm girl, HELLO?) when I told him I’d seen ‘evidence’ of mice. So I set traps anyways. They skirted the traps and had a town (mouse) crier alert the others. I thought well maybe I got lucky and they left … nope. On a lower/walkout level is where I had hidden Hubbs’ Christmas presents, including a bag of chocolate covered peanuts, his all time favorite. Imagine my surprise (and his horror) when I went to wrap the gifts and found a teeny tiny hole in the corner of the chocolate peanut bag. I showed Hubbs, he declared war, and – on Christmas day – 2 little fuzzy friends were snapped in half under the kitchen sink. Happy Holidays! Nothing says Christmas joy like rodents chewing on your snax — ugh!! 😀 MJ

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  6. This is a very funny post! Morgan is on her game. Dead stink in the house drives me crazy because I smell all – intensified. Dead stink in a wall is the worst. Right before we were going to put the house up for sale (which we did not have to do because peeps stepped up and said they wanted the house) dead stink started in the finished basement. My nose took me right to the location… behind a section of the wainscoting. We called Peter my critter guy and he took the wainscoting off and there were five adult dead stinking mice stacked neatly on top of each other in various stages of decomp. He removed them and sprayed de-stinker. Yes, there is more to this story but I won’t bore you with it. Dead stink was a yearly thing in that house in the country. Hope the mice stink is gone soon in your basement!

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    • Last night was another night of mouse catching. Cats were dancing in the basement. (I swear they dance to Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark!) Couldn’t find anything on the floor but I looked up and two sweet little things were peering down at me. I caught them both and re-homed them (hopefully far enough away so they don’t come back) but we saw where they were coming in and found poop. It was a good night. (You need a life when you call mouse catching good.) Stink still in basement though. Maybe we’ll pull the tall heavy cabinets away from the wall today. You were so lucky that someone bought it without all the obligatory open houses and visits from people. I hate selling a house especially with the cats. Last time I sold, I came home at lunch to scoop litter. I scooped three times a day. You never know what turns people off.

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      • Thankfully the couple that bought the house both grew up in the country just 15 minutes down the road. They are all too familiar with mice in the house. We told them all about the critters. They have two sweet dogs that are keeping the bigger critters away from the house now. They were our company that just visited. We sold our house but gained some good friends. I swear every time that we have had to put a house up for sale dead stink showed up. I can only think of two houses where it wasn’t a problem. And honest, I keep a clean house! The dang mice have never been inside the house, they have always fallen down in the walls…ewwwwwww. I think we will be okay here the whole place is concrete block… knock on wood. I can’t believe you just looked up and found those little could be stinkers! Thank heavens for your Sassy dancing cats!

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  8. You and Morgan the Mouser are brave. I know I couldn’t even use the deli cup and cardboard on a spider or centipede, both which give me the heebie jeebies. When I see creepy crawlies in the basement, I have a heavy paint can and drop it down on the offensive critter and don’t move it for weeks to ensure it is dead. Upstairs I panic and hope it runs on the carpet not the wall because I’m a better stomper than swatter, though it’s not always a sure thing with moccasins on, as they wiggle away under my stomping foot sometimes. I just despise anything that goes faster than me, so I commend your bravery Kate.

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      • Wow – I am not even comfortable with mice outside, and I think it is just like the bugs … they move too fast for me and I worry they’ll get in the house and be at large. I can’t touch a bug either. I was doing laundry this morning and saw a big centipede in the laundry room in the basement. I already had started the water and ran upstairs to get the bedding and so it was not like I could abandon the job. I had angst about 10 minutes before I could move in and smack it. It is in pieces now and I will wait for it to dry up before dealing with its guts. 🙂

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  12. Loved this blog! Your reference to the death during questioning gave me a real chuckle. But if the mouse and the man would have stayed out of places they did not really belong, they would both still be around.
    We got a package in a nice sized cardboard box the other day and that is what has been the focus around here.

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    • I have to be careful about boxes. Once sat in, they cannot be removed unless they are replaced. I open all Chewy boxes in the garage. They force me to buy shoes from DSW for the boxes and the bags.

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      • I’m glad you wrote that the smell should be over in three days. I had no idea it would be that short.

        Some carcasses must smell more than others. I found a mouse skeleton in the folds of a flannel sheet that was in a linen closet we used all the time. Obviously, we didn’t use that sheet very often.

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  18. I loved the, death while being questioned. That was too funny. You jogged a memory with this post, and I will share it on my blog. For everyone else here, this is the short version.

    I rode a Harley in my last years of police work. It was kept spotless. I returned from a three day weekend off. Each time I wrote a citation, there was a pungent odor. I kept thiinking something smelled dead, The ticket book was kept in a leather pouch on the Harley. Long story short, there was a very small dead bird in the bottom of the pouch. You couldn’t smell it standing there, but the decomp smell had permeated the paper of the citations in the aluminum citation case.

    Somewhere, there were about 75 people sitting around making faces as they sniffed their citation, trying to place the smell.

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  20. Murray the Mouse (the name I’ve donned on the little fellow, though it probably is a Marsha) was spotted in the compost bin this week. I figured there was something since Elsa has been going insane around it whenever outside. It’s funny what appeals to the heart of a cold blooded killer, er…I mean a mouse hunter. Perhaps Morgan could be convinced to learn to ‘retrieve’ following one of her ‘interrogations?’ It could help with the decomp issue. Good luck-hope you are able to find it soon.

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  21. There’s nothing like that decamp smell of something you just can’t find ( and are worried it’s fallen between walls or something. GAG.
    At least you’re located all the catnip mouses and can rehab them…so someone can gather them up and hoard them again.
    (I love the way you/Morgan add those little comments like “died during questioning. – so funny)
    Paw waves and well done to the cats…

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    • I am convinced (after a day of ripping furniture, boxes, etc. apart) that the dead critter is in the basement. It wafts up the staircase so at least it’s not in the whole house. Many houses ago I had something larger died between the walls and it stank up my bedroom for at least two weeks. There was nothing I could do. Morgan’s interrogation tactics are questionable. We have made her stop the water boarding however many of her suspects end up dead.

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  22. I laughed at your husband’s brownie-detecting nose. My husband is the same way. He could never smell a dirty diaper, either . . . no wait, I know what you’re thinking, but it was actually a good thing because it meant he didn’t mind changing the diaper when I called attention to the stink.

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    • When he was young, he was a smoker. He hasn’t smoked in decades but his sense of smell was diminished. The good news is that he can’t smell so good. The bad news is that he can’t smell so good. In this case it’s good. He can smell when I am cooking something he likes. I, on the other hand, can smell a fish fart in the pond! 🙂

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  23. We were having lots of mice problems…and they were all over our kitchen counters at night. Yuck. Finally brought an exterminator in, and they put down the bait hotels, but also plugged many of the holes around pipes coming into the house in the basement. When they put in pipes they make the holes larger than the pipes and mice come in this way. They put a product called Stuffin in the holes to fill it in and we haven’t seen mice since. We won’t talk about how lazy our four cats are!!

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