JOHN MACLEOD: A clatter in the larder, a scrabble, a squeak (and even stolen stock cubes). There's a moose loose aboot my hoose!

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

Most winters I have had a moose loose aboot the hoose. Especially when, given Covid and my late father's growing vulnerability, I spent a succession of winters in Edinburgh, returning to my island lair come spring.
But there were never more than a handful of mice, they would disappear within days of my return – given warming weather and my two Jack Russell terriers, in their prime so vigilant that even a spider dared not show its head – and said rodents were always extremely shy.
In March, though, I began to worry. The brazen creatures started to scurry across the living-room. Show up during the preparation of Sunday lunch and make off with things.
The house increasingly resonated with squeaks and scrabbles. One evening there was a mighty clatter in the larder, as the unwelcome guests bounced around wrestling at tins, knocking over tins or the bottle of Lea & Perrins and making off, incredibly, with stock-cubes.
As things grew noisy in the loft I started to have uneasy dreams – the midnight hour; the unquiet coffin. But still I held off, sure the coming balmy weather would restore order as it always had before.
Then one day I espied, on a local bookstall and for pennies, a mint hardback copy of Seldon and Newell's Johnson at 10, a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger account of that recent, excessively exciting premiership.
I bore it home on triumph and left it by the cooker, the blond bombshell himself on the dustjacket.
On the morrow, he was no more. I stared. And gawped. Said dust-jacket had been stripped to the tiniest ribbons. Most of it borne away.
I didn't need to be Sherlock to figure that, somewhere unseen, a Mrs Mouse big with child was joyously preparing her nursery. Days later, I even saw one leading a troop of infants across the floor.
For an instant, I thought her a rat. Then I realised these were no fieldmice. These were house-mice – permanently established, with no intention of going anywhere, and about to breed exponentially.
I take no joy in killing anything, but this was a situation where I had to move hard, fast and without pity.
House-mice are bad news. They early hit sexual maturity and breed thereafter and with such libidinous abandon that Mummy can have seventy-odd babies a year.
By the end of the second year, her descendants may be in the tens of thousands. Mice, moreover, have no sphincters on their little bladders. Everywhere they go, they leave a sticky trail of wee.
Still more dangerously, they gnaw. They have to: their teeth never stop growing. And among the things they like to gnaw – and, potentially, with inflammatory consequences – are electric cables.
I took fast stock. Consulted quickly, and sent for Murdo of Pest Control Hebrides, lithe and wiry and charm personified.
Over thirty years – including long service for Rentokil, till he set up in his own right – Murdo has become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Bykes of seething wasps, bugs in the bed, rats in the byre, mice in the pantry and, for all I know, bats in the belfry – Murdo takes on them all.
He was at my gate within hours, shouldering a mighty holdall and oozing enthusiasm. He could not have been nicer and there were no finger-wagging lectures as to my neglect.
In twenty minutes he had cased the entire jaunt like Sanders of the River. Identified centres of particular activity and preferred routes of Mickey and Minnie passage.
Mice, Murdo explained, like primarily to base themselves in your loft, ascending through wall cavities. They feel safest there, even a couple of floors above any food-supply. And they come and go from the house in daylight, able to squeeze beneath doors and through the tiniest gaps.
Murdo slew other myths too. In thirty years, he asserts flatly, he has never been attacked by a rat. 'If he's cornered, he'll fly over your shoulder – towards light – but this idea that they'll go for your throat is nonsense.'
I asked if mice are as neophobic as rats – fearful of anything new. Days and days can pass before rats approach a trap or take placed bait.
Not at all, he said; blithe and confident, mice will tuck in immediately. The trouble is, given the industrial breeding-cycle of rodents, and that a minority will always have some inherent immunity, today's wonder-poison is tomorrow's uselessness.
Sixty years ago, there was great excitement at the success of Warfarin – yes, that selfsame physick which, in careful dosage, keeps Granny from another stroke.
These days, you could only bump off a rat with Warfarin if you dropped a 25-kilo sack of the stuff on top of it.
I confined myself to my office, keeping the pooches under close control, as Murdo did his thing. He departed half an hour later, promising to return in a fortnight.
Behind him he left, secreted in every conceivable recess and up in the loft, thirty little plastic bait-stations packed with his strongest, neon-blue rodenticide.
For several days there seemed to be very little difference. Only on Monday, something was still pattering about above the ceiling. And then, on Tuesday evening – though I have not glimpsed one tiny corpse – all was still.
What brought on this plague is hard to figure out. A near neighbour has started keeping chickens: little is more cheering than the joyous cackle of a successful hen, but where there are poultry you will fast attract rodents.
There were mice in our Victorian pile of a family home in Edinburgh, but never in great number and never sighted above the ground floor.
Walls of redoubtable Giffnock stone, of course, do not have cavities. There are also, in typical suburbia, very many marauding cats and these no doubt kept the population in check.
Here there is only Minnie, next door; and she much prefers to drape herself atop a wall like a languid Garfield and drive my wee dogs quietly demented.
There is another local factor. A quarter-century ago, Lewis and Harris were overrun with feral mink – the progeny of a failed, Sixties fur-farm venture – and to the point where most people simply stopped keeping poultry: it was not worth the heartache and expense.
The slinky creatures were so brazen that I once watched an entire family of mink playing by Tarbert pier, undaunted by tourists and ferry traffic.
But when the beasts started to swim the Sound of Harris and threaten Uist's globally important population of ground-nesting bird, what is now NatureScot launched an extermination programme, initially just in south Harris but in short order across the entire island.
They are now history. But the marauding mink had one lonely virtue – they kept the rodent population decisively in check.
I now keep all foodstuffs in my fridge or in tight containers. Tupperware is my new friend. Spills are addressed immediately; no unwashed crockery is left lying about.
Dolefully I still remember one shocked little mouse, frozen by the hob and with his little arms clutching roast potato, and we eyeballed each other for a long moment before I waved him on.
Something had to be done.