Hi, and welcome to Day in the Life of Dovid Davis Pest Specialist. Yesterday, I had a chance to talk with Dovid Davis the Director of A # 1 Pest Control of Baltimore Maryland. He asked me what I wanted to learn about, and I answered mice ."Okay," he said, "We'll talk about mice.

Mice , Dovid noted, are generally 2-3 inches long, they weigh from half an ounce to an ounce and 1/2 generally they are brown or grey. Some of the things they prefer, food wise, include cereal, fruit, vegetables and meat. Mice are strange in their behavior pattern in that they do not eat a lot of food at once, they tend to nibble 20-30 times. But altogether, their daily consumption of food is less than 1/10^th of an ounce.

There are some interesting facts about mice that people should know. Mice  are excellent climbers. They can climb up on walls; they can climb up on furniture. However, the range of how far they travel is less than 30 feet. So they won't go more than 30 feet for food water or shelter. Since they don't go more than 30 feet from where they're nesting, if their food source is more than 30 feet away, they'll move their nest.

Mice are nocturnal, which means that most of their activity, their running around their exploring and feeding takes place after sunset and before sunrise. Most people don't realize, that when mice travel and they are healthy they travel at 12 feet per second. And that's why it's so hard to catch them. And one mouse, the average mouse, makes approximately 50 droppings a day. Ugghh!

So how do we catch these critters? The traditional way is with mouse snatch traps, and or placing commercial strength rodenticide, in areas that are not visible and not accessible to children or pets. It generally takes 72 hours for them to be attracted to the bait, to eat it, and to die.

I wanted to know what happens to the mice  when they die, because no one wants dead smelly mice lying around their house or kitchen. But Dovid assured me that the poison makes the mice thirsty so they tend to go outside and eat grass and drink water, and die outside. But if they do die inside the house they are only odorous for no more than 72 hours. Then they start to disintegrate. Well I don't know about you, but I am not crazy about the idea of smelly decaying mice in my house, even for less than 72 hours. However, it does beat having live mice.