Maybe six times over 40 years, we’ve had incursions of warmth-seeking mice from the park next door in late autumn. If they’re lucky, I catch them before the cats do. Once I devised my own clever humane trap which actually worked, but usually it turns out the mice are smarter than I am. For instance, I was sweeping leaves from the front porch when I wondered why a plastic bag by the column was wriggling and dancing. I intelligently opened wide the bag to be shocked by a mouse frisking about in the birdseed I was throwing away; he leapt out of the bag[1], almost hitting me in the nose, and ran straight for the open door of the house. Crap. What did I think would happen if I left a bag of birdseed on the porch?!
[1] A common house mouse can run as fast as 7.5 to 8 mph, or cover 12’ in one second. Such speeds would be equivalent to a 5-foot 10-inch human being running more than 160 mph.
A domestic cat can run up to 30 mph in a short spurt. [from the internet]
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