I may add a few things: In addition to using store brand rat baits, you can make some of your own. There are various formulas that I have tried. Basically you have a BASE ingredient. I choose corn meal and creamy peanutbutter. Then mix it with combination of the following: --sugar -*- baking powder/ -*- ground pure aspirin -+- plaster of paris also, provide some water for them. All [-*- ]items will cause digestion problem. Aspirin, may cause internal bleeding. As long as you get them eat your bait you are on the right track. Keep it on. Do not expect them drop dead right away. You want them to get sick and die.That is best you can do. For those of you with dogs/cats. As suggested, take a big metal coffee can and cut an entrance for rats. You can do this with a metal shearer. Now invert that can over the bait dish. Put a brick or stone on the can so cats/dogs/wind cannot tople it. So this is cat/dog proof, wind proof, rain proof, bird proof, squirrel proof,... You can use the same idea for rat traps but the cover has to be big enough to accomodate the trap to snap without any obsticle.

Mice have long tails. We have two kinds, the gray mouse and the brown with white belly. Brown ones, Deer mice come in pairs, if you kill two, they are gone. Grays, House mice are non-pairing, come in quantities. I hate seeing the gray ones, you never know if you got them all. Voles here are mice sized, with very short tails, like Hamsters. Also come in quantities, but I have never had them come into the house. Barn cat catches a bunch of them. Look very like mice, just no tails. Shrews are tiny, often dark, about half the size of a mouse. Maybe as large as a lady's thumb. Terrible fighters, will kill mice and eat them. I look at the funny noses to see if they are shrews. Some are star shaped noses, or other wise different than mice. Usually the eyes are also very small, compared to mice with big eyes. A full sized Mole is about hand sized with the front feet looking like he wears baseball mitts!! Way oversized front feet to allow lots of dirt moving very quickly. You might mix him up with a small rat, but not a mouse. Much bigger than mice. They also might have a funny shaped nose to help them locate earthworms in the dirt and aid in moving dirt as they tunnel along. I don't think they kill mice like the shrews. My dog is more likely to dig up a Mole and flip it around to kill it. One small dog with big ears will track the digging mole, while the other large dog does the digging to find Mole. I get the corpse as my present or find it later in the yard. The cat doesn't work that hard, she only chases things above the ground.

I LOVE THIS MOUSETRAP/KILLER!!! I first bought two just to see if they would work. I put one in my garage which was getting overrun with mice and one on my back enclosed patio. I have had these traps out now for almost two weeks and have killed over a dozen mice! ALL ON THE SAME SETS OF BATTERIES!!! Once I have a dead mouse (you can tell by the tail sticking out of the opening of the trap), I take it outside and shake it out of the Victor trap onto a corner of my drive. A short time later, the crows come and eat them! Since I've been doing this, I am now on their regular morning route through here! LOL! They sure love those dead things! Anyway, I hate poisons and this trap kills mice quickly and humanely without poison! Then the bodies are food for the crows/ravens since they only eat dead critters/road kill! WONDERFUL!!!

Thank you to all who took the time to read my long, novel-like chronicle of symptoms and suspicions. Already working on the cutworm collars...and I had called the exterminator even before I wrote my diatribe. He layed traps. Only one mouse thus far. Oh...and I did start on my own personal comost pile earlier in the summer. But these pictures I put up were of garden #1, during the summer. I bought two cubic yards of the best compost our local landscaping/nursery man carried. I was lucky that my husband just happened to take me to pick it up because I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how much I had purchased. I about died when I went outside from paying for compost in the office to see a large tractor dumping the last scoop full of it into the now overloaded bed of my bewildered husbands big Silverado truck! (see picture...which is only half of what I bought. The first half was put out front!) Honestly, I thought it would be a few bags similar to what I had purchased at Home Depot! Talk about a newbie! At any rate, all of that has been tilled into the garden now before I even planted for the cold crops. I already have sprouted brussel sprout seedlings waiting to be planted again. It is not due to stop raining here until Sunday; if the ground is not too soden, I will plant them and the others that are ready then, place collars on anything that remains, and then put chicken wire tops on everything until they outgrow them. Now, after all this sage advice, I guess it could have been birds after all. Blue Jays? Now those I WOULD see every morning, along with smaller sparrow-type birds, in their busy little worlds, pecking away in my garden, while I opened the cupboard to make coffee. I usually let my dog out to pee pee and she would make a beeline for them. But who knows how long they were pecking away in there and how big some of them were earlier in the morning hours. Maybe even an owl or larger bird? But I think those are dedicated carnivores. (When I lived in Santa Barbara I once saw a hawk swoop down and carry off a pigeon. It was devastating to me. Poor bird. I am so grateful to be at the top of the food chain. But the seagulls will snatch whole sandwiches out of your hand while you are busy admiring the ocean. So I know that birds take things, sometimes heavy things, up into the air and away. Maybe a 2 1/2 watermelon plant? ) Still a bit baffled. But the collars and cages are coming out until the plants are big enough to survive. This post was edited by lindsaybev on Thu, Nov 20, 14 at 13:26