On the trail of a most-destructive beast

White-footed deer mouse track showing distinctive tail drag mark

With the heavy snow cover we now have here in Nolalu, 50 km southwest of Thunder Bay, Ont., there is little sign of animals. They are hunkering down for the duration, waiting until spring and the 30-plus inches of snow melts, or forms a crust that allows them to walk on top. However, there are suddenly footprints of a creature that wreaks havoc everywhere it encounters human beings: the white-footed deer mouse.
Just today Brenda had to get a deer mouse nest removed from the heater system of her car. In October, I had the same thing done with my pickup truck. Brenda's car was invaded while parked here in our Nolalu driveway. My truck was hit while parked in Red Lake Marine's parking lot in Red Lake. In addition, I had to remove a huge mouse nest from my tractor in Nolalu.
They are incredibly fast at their dirty work. Brenda uses her vehicle every day so they had only 12 hours to work on it before it started rolling again. I had used my truck two days before I turned on the fan only to find it made a loud racket. I had used my tractor all day long the day before its engine began running incorrectly and overheating. I opened the hood to find a small muskrat house-size nest beneath.
Brenda's car just had the nest in the heater. It cost $130 to remove.
My truck had 12 dead mice inside. It set me back $200.
There was no cost on the tractor.
When we owned the camp we had continuous destruction from white-footed mice. They are adept at slipping into the cabins and ruining people's food. In the lodge, it seemed the mice checked for an opening every night, perhaps a door not tightly shut or a window screen out of position. One time they gnawed a hole through the ceiling during the winter, and ruined hundreds of dollars worth of t-shirts and caps that we were to sell the next summer.
I have had them ruin all sorts of possessions and clothing.
It's important not to tar all mice with the same brush. In the 56 years that my family owned and operated the camp and in the 35 years that we have lived in Nolalu we have never had a single problem with any other mouse species. Meadow mice (voles), red-backed voles, jumping mice, star-nosed moles and shrews have caused us no problems whatsoever.
We were at a New Year's gathering at a friend's house out here in the country and every person there had virtually the same experience with white-footed mice, including with vehicles and machines. In fact the conversation started when our host revealed he had just paid $700 to repair his generator after white-footed mice had burrowed into the air cleaner and sent particles through the engine.
Many of us had also come up with the same type of wholesale mouse trap: a 5-gallon bucket. One fellow said he always has one such trap in his workshop. While you can fiddle around with ingenious gizmos for the mice to climb across before plummeting into the trap, you really don't need anything: just place a regular bucket against a wall with some bait in the bottom, like sunflower seeds, and the next day you will have one or more mice inside. It's up to you what to do from there.
I prefer to place a few inches of water in the bottom, then rig a bait over the top, something like a chunk of bacon. I only place such traps inside, of course, usually after the mice have destroyed something.
With such a widespread pest you would expect to see them all the time. In fact, just the opposite is the case. I haven't seen a single live deer mouse in the wild for years. They are that elusive. I see meadow mice and red-backed voles -- the woods version of the short-tailed mouse set -- frequently, any time I mow the fields with the tractor or just walk in the bush. Meadow mice are the dark, plump, short-tailed creatures that eat seeds from plants that grow in the fields. Red-backed voles do exactly the same thing but in the bush. I've always been impressed at how segregated they keep themselves. Two feet into the bush around a field there are zero meadow mice, just red-backs. Two feet into the field there are no red-backs, just meadow mice.
On our snowshoe walk today we discovered that the last heavy snow knocked a lot of maple wings (seed cases) off mountain maple shrubs. It must be a favorite with the white-footed mice because their tracks were everywhere. Their tracks are distinctive because they show the creature's long tail dragging through the snow.
Other than signs of the mice, we found one grouse den, a few rabbit tracks (snowshoe hare) and deer trails. Deer are wandering beneath the white cedars, feeding on branches weighed down by snow. It's a struggle for them to get through the snow but on the good side, there is somewhat less snow beneath the conifers.

Grouse plunked into snow, spent the night, then flew out the other side

Enormous track of the snowshoe hare

I cleared this trail through part of our bush