A Creature is Stirring and I Don't Think It's a Mouse

I live in a fairly rural area. This means sometimes mice take up residence in the house, usually in the fall when the weather turns, sometimes in the summer, they like to live in my crawl space. I sometimes get moles in the yard, the dogs make enough of a ruckus so squirrels steer clear of my house. It all goes with "Country Living".

This year is no exception, but I think I have a bigger critter problem. My dogs, the terriers especially, have been expressing an interest in one exterior corner of my house and they would like to get behind my hot water heater with far too much attention than I would like. The other day I opened my food cupboard to put away a jar and noticed that the three unopened bags of grains had chew marks and holes. The bags were fine on Tuesday. Plus something is trying to get into my garbage can, the lip of the trash bag also has some holes. Mice can jump, but not that high.

Last night I set out a couple mouse traps and at one point in the evening I heard a SNAP, so I figured I'd have some cleaning to do in the morning and went back to sleep. Around 4 AM the dogs started to put up a ruckus and I also heard my veggie basket take a tumble. I went into the kitchen and sure enough, a couple spice jars on the lower spice shelf (I have some open shelving)had been knocked over and one mouse trap closed, but no varmint (yet the dog biscuit I put out as a lure was gone). The terriers were a bit frantic, what ever had been in the kitchen was gone (or has gone back to my basement crawl space).

Soooo, I will have to take this to a new level. I'm really hoping that whatever is in my house will beat feet. The noisy terriers will spend this evening sleeping loose, I'll take a flashlight and look in the crawl space. I don't mind sharing my outdoor space with natures creatures, I do mind them helping themselves to my hard to find french lentils......