Rodents making home in GENERATOR CONTROL BOX

Depending on how willing you are to keep up with it, rodents HATE the smell of mothballs. We scatter a few in strategic areas, and they last for months (depending on the ventilation).

I agree with your assessment that poison results in dead mice stinking up the place. The bars that I've found most effective contain an anticoagulant that takes a few days to kill 'em and they usually seek out the comfort of their home base to die. I like to deny them entrance to the buildings, and provide bait stations outdoors. The stations keep out pets, etc. The vermin die in the woods. If you have sufficient predators in the area, don't use the poison, though, 'cause the poisoned rodents might get eaten by the local dogs/cats/whatever, and that ain't fair. In my case, our dogs and one cat are too old to be of much help, so chemical warfare is called for.

Joe

I still have some left of the original box of mothballs I bought twenty plus years ago ( I keep them in a glass jar) to evict skunks from under the back shed - I just drop three or four through a hole in the floor every couple years. One little skunk decided it would be a good idea to make a nest and raise a family under the step at the back door and even carried the moth ball I had tossed in, back out the hole. She gave up however when I started pouring a daily cupful of chlorine bleach down the crack between the step and the house. Gerry :-)} London, Canada

At least you didn't try an ammonia chaser.

I don't know Gerry, it is pretty bad when a Skunk thinks your place stinks so bad it doesn't want to stick around ;-)

I just send them four doors up the street to visit my neighbour, they have a business called "Wild Things" and do wild animal control. If I called them it would cost me money, but if I send the critters to them, the critters become their problem. Gerry :-)} London, Canada

On Fri, 05 Oct 2007 14:25:38 -0400, with neither quill nor qualm, Leon Fisk quickly quoth:

I'm sure she just -loved- the apartment, but all the chlorine in the pool was turning her hair green. She simply had to leave.

-------------------------------------------- -- I'm in touch with my Inner Curmudgeon. -- ============================================

Moth balls

Gunner

What if you don't have tweezers, and a microscope?

Gunner, I went to a hardware store and bought some moth balls. I now understand why mice hate their smell: I do hate it too. I put some in a plastic jar, with four holes drilled, and put that into the generator enclosure. I hope that they will work. I may put one right into the control box.

Find a larger moth.

Harold

An aspect of poison I've not seen mentioned yet is that if the mice have an ample supply of food, they tend to cache the poison for later. I used to put dcon in a garage and when it disappeared fairly quickly, I thought my rodent problem was over in short order... but I put box after box out there over the course of the winter, and though I rarely saw mice, the dcon kept disappearing.

Come spring time, I needed my tall rubber boots (which also lived in the garage), and I had to empty out at least a box worth of dcon from the boots. When we moved, I found little pockets of the stuff hidden away in all sorts of cracks and nooks in the garage.

So, no matter if you think you've placed the poison in a spot where other wildlife and/or pets can't get to it, there's no telling where the mice will store it for leaner times.

I put mothballs in the enclosure, they smell rather bad and, I think, it will keep the critters out.

Mothra?