The first capture of the season

Yesterday I showed you my first casualty of the overwintering season: a favorite plant that appears to have died due to underwatering.

Today I show you the first capture of the season. No, it's not a makeshift hamster cage, although it looks a bit like that.

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If you've been following me for a while you know that I treat all wildlife quite well, choosing to coexist when possible (like sharing the garden with deer and woodchucks) but when not, live and let live.

Like with mice that seem to move into the garage each winter once it gets cold.

In yesterday's post there was going to be a photo of an echeveria leaf that had rooted and sprouted a tiny new plant -- in the section about "new life". When I went to snap the photo though, the miniscule plant was gone! The entire leaf was, and I could only blame a mouse.

Setting a couple of my live traps last night...

...resulted in the capture of the first mouse of the winter (hiding in one of the cardboard tubes in the first photo).

I'm really quite surprised that I found a mouse, because the garage has gone through a major clean up recently (since I'm using it for a workshop now). Here's what it looked like a few months ago:

That's perfect mouse habitat -- so many boards to climb on, hide behind, nest in. Especially since that pile of "supplies" doesn't get touched very often, and certainly not during winter.

Here's the current view:

You can't really see the floor there, but those railings are all that's there -- no wood or other stuff leaning against the wall. Nowhere for mice to hide, right?

I'll be setting out my traps again tonight, letting any additional captured mice join the first in the bucket until a warm day arrives. That's when I'll release them in the nearby field, giving them the best chance of survival.

Strange that the trap I set on the growing table -- where the baby echeveria was growing -- did not catch anything. Does that indicate that there's only a single mouse that's been moving between the garage and basement? I doubt it -- in my experience there's never just one mouse -- but we'll see.

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