The idea came straight from a complete accident.
A few weeks ago when I walked into the barn for the usual morning chicken feeding...I realized that I'd forgotten to put the lids back on the trash cans that hold the corn for feeding. Somewhat blind from sun/snow glare having just stepped into the barn from outside...I had to double-take when I looked down into the can to see the bottom of it full of gray little moving blobs. Must have been close to 20 mice in there!! zoiks!!
I didn't have it in me to "off" all these little fury guys so I just tipped the can down and like a stream of water they poured out and ran off into various nooks and crannies. (Thankfully not up my leg) Yet...NOW knowing that TWO dozen mice are making a good living inside the barn starts to wear on my mind. I'm not really cool with mice wandering amongst our chickens and our fresh eggs. So I decided to reenact this accidental capture in the form of a 5 gallon bucket plan.
It's working! While not capturing two dozen at a time...3 or more a day isn't bad. There's a certain spot down the road that I walk them to and upon tipping the bucket these little fellas run off into the field in one direction or another. I'm just hoping they don't find their way BACK to the barn. I've thought about marking them in some way so I could prove whether or not I did recapture them again in the future...but that just seemed like a complication to a simple experiment. So far it's successful. One, three, four mice at a time...who knows, maybe I'm fooling myself that I'm actually helping anything here?
There is a hawk family that lives nearby. If nothing else maybe I'm helping the circle-of-life?
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