I didn't see any mice. I have a cat, though? Maybe they smell the cat and stay away?

I sometimes find my cat in the "watching" position. But she just plays with them. I have seen a mouse eating HER food in the garage! I hope they don't come in. There was a wren in my greenhouse today, I don't know what it was after.

Charlotte is a killer, Amy. It's disturbing. She leaves their heads on our front porch. Not sure if it's a gift to us or a warning for the mice. This reminds me...she's past due for her worming. (thanks for the reminder, stockergal) I take her to the vet for the worming and it's never fun to take a cat to the vet. I'd rather take the two dogs (and they're not good dogs) at the same time.

Right there with ya, stockergal. The war has been on.

It never ends in a camper lol. I tried balsam and that does deter them from that entrance but they always find another way.

I haven't noticed them in the house, but have seen a few in the garage. We have rat poison out there, so I only saw them for a day or two, largely on the mornings after we dropped down into the single digit temperatures at night. Hopefully the rat poison got them. I hate using it and we have to be super careful to keep the garage closed up at all times so a dog or cat won't find a rodent that just ingested rat poison. I have no problem keeping the garage closed up, but the men in this family constantly forget to close the doors.

Men are like that, yeah they are.

Kim, explain balsam vs mice please?

Hazel, when I was pregnant with number 2 son I had a cat who left half eatten things in the garden for me. I put a bell on her at the time, cause I just couldn't cope. One day I kept hearing this furious jingling. No 1 son (then 4) had clipped a clothes pin to her ear.

Our feed store sells balsam bags for the farmers to keep in the trucks tractors to deter mice. They are not cheap but they definitely work. I of course am allergic to them so I don't use them as much as I would like to. You just don't use them with traps as you don't want to draw them in and try to deter at the same time.

We just moved to the country bringing out 14-year-old city cat with us. She's in heaven with the mice and rats. During the fall she brought one or two a day home and devoured them...in our bedroom. All that was left was the stomach and intestines. She bagged about a dozen, which I suspect was the total population of her hunting grounds.

When we first moved to the country, we put in a dog door so the dogs and cats could come and go freely. It was such a mistake! One cat, Moose, was such an avid hunter that he'd bring his kills inside to show them off. That was strike one against the dog/cat door. One day Moose brought in dead rodents and birds and lined them up on the floor of the walk-in pantry while we were gone for the day, and that was strike two against the dog door. When I opened the front door to walk out one day and Moose ran into the house with a live pine vole in his mouth, that was strike 3 against the dog door (and he hadn't even used the dog door in that specific incident). By the time I had chased the vole around the house (Moose didn't want to kill it, he wanted to toy with it and play with it), caught it beneath a bucket placed upside down to 'cover' it up and then was able to flip over the bucket, slide a lid over it and carry the vole back outside......the dog door was dead and ready to be removed. We have acres of woodland and grassland, so we'll never be rodent-free, but our cats do a great job of keeping them out of the yard and away from the house for the most part. The cats did wipe out both the moles and gophers our first-year here, but the woodland acres have more voles than the cats can kill, and as the cats get older and lazier, they don't hunt as much as they once did.

My son spent the night with a friend who had one of those dog doors. His cat brought in a live rabbit and taught the kittens to hunt. The rabbit was bleeding, and they ran it all over the house. You can imagine. We have a cat door between the house and garage. Her food dish and litterbox are in the garage. Surprisingly she doesn't like to go out when the outer door is open.