tracking a rodent

If you want to track something like that, you will have to spend some bucks. The methods and devices used are very expensive.

On the other hand, it is not a healthy thing to have a rodent in your home. He will certainly do some damage. They will chew in to things, and leave facieses all over the place. The waste from these rodents can carry disease, and pose a serious health hazard.

I realize that they look very cute. One thing for sure, is that if it feels threatened or cornered by you, it can come out very quickly and start biting, to defend itself. You may one day corner it without even realizing it.

If your local health department found out about this, I am sure that they would not be too pleased about it. Also, your neighbours would not be appreciative of this either. These rodents can also be dangerous for children and other small pets. Naturally, this excludes pets, such as, cats, large lizards, foxes, racoons, skunks, and snakes.

I would suggest to get rid of it. If you don't want to kill it, I would agree with that. It's life is supposed to be outside in a field or a forest, and not in our homes. I would then suggest to find a way to trap it alive, and release it somewhere in the wild. When I was young I knew an older fellow that was doing that with wild animals, including rodents. This was interesting, and also costly for him. He had to buy all the proper equipment to do this type of trapping.

When I first read your question, the first thing that came to my mind was to suggest to you to buy a cat! Or, to get at least a big lizard.

I am sure that there are a lot of people here who would agree with my view about a wild rodent in a home.

--

Jerry G. ======

First step would be to get yourself a webcam. Many of these cameras come with motion triggered recording S/W!

Do you have some camera to connect to your PC ? There is a lot of software around that will start a recording as soon as something changes in the frame.

It will not only record the time, but also the Mickey's picture :-)

Hello Gerard

Please can you provide a link for the software as I have a similar problem with vermin(vandals) near my home and would like to catch them in the act. Can't afford to get a security camera at the moment, so want to use my webcam.

Thanks

corlioni1976

Well, actually I 'bought' a commercial product (at the quivalent of 4 US$ :-). But there is freeware around:

prym110c.zip Puts webcam pictures on the WWW. Free

Pryme is a webcam program that among other things can can capture pictures form your webcam, and upload them to your website using FTP.

Features: - Captures images from your webcam, and uploads them to your homepage via FTP. - Captures at regular intervals. - Captures via motion-detection function. - Keeps 10 most recent pictures available on your homepage. - Adds captions to the captured pictures with weekday, time and date. - Minimizes to the taskbar and works in the background. - Starts automatically with windows. - Logs messages to a text file. - Changes between setup profiles, allowing you to quickly change between different setups. - Browser to view the taken photographs, movies and the logfile.

Special requirements: None.

Freeware. Uploaded by the author.

Simon Hiort-Lorenzen snipped-for-privacy@hilo.dk

I agree with a lot of what Jerry says and would be glad to be rid of the rodents. However, I think I can do a better job of it if I know more about how they are getting into the apartment and what it is actually doing there. I would also like to emphasize that these are mice, not rats. I'm not thinking of keeping it as a pet in either case.

Moreover:

"Jerry G." writes:

When I first observed a mouse a few months ago, and killed it by a method that occurred to me on the spur of the moment, I received some glue traps and no other guidance from the building management. I did some searching and learned that glue traps are considered a particularly cruel way to kill mice, and read a web page that, like Jerry, advised capturing the mouse and letting it go outside, on the theory that it would not be able to find its way back to the building and that it would be happier outside. Then I found another website that acknowledged all the above, but pointed out that there are some mice that really can't survive outdoors in the winter and that they look exactly the same to the untrained eye as the mice that can survive outdoors. For the indoor mice, they thought that glue traps were a better idea than putting the mice outdoors, and that since one can't tell the difference without really knowing something about mice, one should use the glue traps, period.

I'm also aware of some kind of poison one can put out that will induce the mice to go somewhere outside the apartment to die. I'm considering that also.

The best solution, it seems to me, is to find out how they are getting into the apartment and then prevent them from doing it. That way, I don't have to clean rotting mouse corpses out of the kitchen and disinfect the area before eating breakfast.

There are already plenty of mice living in the walls. The management is unconcerned about this and I have no rights in the matter. It is just that once the mice get into my apartment, I have to deal with it. There are so many mice in the walls that for a long time I thought my upstairs neighbors had a dog that was always running around, until I finally met them and asked them. What they do have is a bird, and that apparently tends to attract a lot of mice, since the mice are smart enough to know that where there are pet birds, there is a lot of birdseed on the floor.

I don't have a digital camera of any kind and I don't know anything about them. Also, I'm running RedHat Linux on my PC. I went to sourceforge.net and I see a lot of software for talking to webcams but they seem to assume something about the chipsets of the webcams, which presupposes that I know something about webcams, which I don't. Also, I don't know what the cameras supported by the software costs.

Perhaps someone who knows something about the cameras can look at the relevant webpage at sourceforge.

At any rate, a simple beam should be adequate just to get started and that wouldn't require me to get bogged down with the interfacing problems with Linux that I usually find so intractable. Moreover, I think it is probably cheaper just to set up a beam. As I mentioned in my original posting, I can get one from Radio Shack for about $30, even if the solution it offers is flawed. So I don't want a solution that winds up costing more than that.

"Allan Adler" wrote

Ah, you will change your mind with time ...

Get 'Victor' traps, with the 'V' on them. Peanut butter for bait. Chunky. Get a chunk wedged into the bait thingy. Set against the baseboards and between appliances and the wall.

There is another brand called Defender (Enforcer ?). Not worth mouse poop, of which you will soon have a lot of.

I finally remembered that there is some kind of pair of IR LED's, one that emits and one that detects. They probably just cost a few dollars, even from Radio Shack. I've never used them. For one thing, can I set them a few feet from each other? Are they hard to align? Since the answer is probably yes, are there simple tools to make it easier?

Yes. But you will probably spent much more than $30 before they do anything close to what you want them to :-)

Yes. But if you expect them to see each other, you will need a highly sophisticated pulsing system, an enclosure and IR-lenses.

Indeed. As IR is very hard to 'see' it is not easy to setup an optical system for IR. *) And yes, it can be done simpler: buy them ready made :-)

Thanks to Gerald Bok for his helpful comments about IR LEDs and receivers.

One point I'm not clear on is the difficulty of aligning them.

For example: I might be wrong, but I think that a remote for a TV basically uses IR and doesn't need to be aimed very accurately. Sometimes, if there is a lot of stuff between the remote and the TV or VCR, I can simply bounce the beam off a wall or the ceiling.

For another example, people who buy toy robots are sometimes in communication with them via some kind of remote using IR transmitter and receiver. There is a book on building robots with a Palm computer and it has some instructions for how to add IR communication capabilities.

So, I find it hard to believe that it is really all that difficult.

Also, it occurs to me that I don't really need to use a beam. Instead, there might be some kind of switch that will normally remain open but which will close when the mouse steps on it. This might involve some guesswork about the weight of the mouse. Also, to avoid having to restrict the movements of the mouse, it would be best if there were some kind of strip that could stretch across the doorway that would serve as such a switch no matter where along its length the mouse happens to tred.

Is such a thing available?

Just for example, I know that if my old EICO 460 oscilloscope is plugged in incorrectly (it has an unpolarized plug, for some reason, but it really does matter which way it is plugged in due to the catalytic capacitor on the way in), then the scope isn't grounded properly and one manifestation of this seems to be that when I get near the scope, my body acts as an antenna and causes the display on the scope to change wildly [another manifestation is that I get an electric shock when I touch the power strip the scope is plugged into...]. So, maybe the mouse will also act as an antenna and this effect can be picked up electronically along a strip, preferably by a safer method.

Can I do this?

Bouncing all over the place is one of the objects of a remote control. Your mouse detector requires a well defined beam as a remote control type IR would never be interupted by a humble mouse :-)

By the way: don't underestimate the complexity of a remote control. Early PC's had to do with less computing power :-)

Just try to build such a beast. It should trip on an 8 gram mouse but not on draft...

No. You're talking about a switch almost 3 ft wide that should trip on just a few grams activating power. That's less than a mild breath.

That's a smart way to detect something. But it wouldn't detect Mikey :-) This operates by you being rather big. Big antenna, close to some sensitive detector causes disturbance by capacitive coupling.

Mickey, on the other hand, only acts as a small antenna, hardly disturbing anything (other than the cheese :-)

I do think it is a mouse but I doubt very much that it weighs only 8 grams. I'm not talking about cute little white mice. I think the one I killed was a lot heavier than that.

In my experience with domestic rodents, the difference between a mouse and a rat is that the mouse is brown and fairly small, doesn't have the characteristic rat tail and runs away when it sees you, while a rat does have the tail, is grey and as big as a cat and walks around the apartment as though it owns the place and is letting you stay there, instead of eating you, because you leave food out for it.

I just heard that a friend of mine who is a cat lover and has lots of cats had her home invaded by a rat. Since there was plenty of food to go around and since the rat was as big as the cats, apparently the cats made friends with the rat and there arose a state of peaceful coexistence based on mutually assured destruction. She finally got rid of it by calling an exterminator.

Anyway, I regret that I didn't weigh the mouse I killed before throwing out the body, but I think 8 ounces is a better guess than 8 grams. This, at any rate, emphasizes the need to weigh the mouse I'm presently dealing with. Suppose I manage to narrow the access the mouse has to the kitchen via the doorway so that it has to walk over a certain rectangular region. What are my options for weighing the mouse, without capturing it, and automatically recording the weight?

Thanks for this explanation. Is there some convenient way to estimate the relative strength of the signal? For example, I am bigger than the mouse both in weight and in size. So I don't know whether it is the fact that I represent a greater quantity of matter or the fact that I take up more space. Also, much of the space I occupy is further removed from the "detector", so the signal represented by that part ought to be attenuated. Question: what in me actually serves as the antenna? Is it the water that makes up most of my body?

Returning to the question of detecting me or the mouse in our roles as antennae, doesn't the detection of the antenna depend to some extent on the strength of the signal that is being transmitted from that antenna? When I serve as an antenna for my EICO, I don't know where the signal comes from but I think it is probably radio waves that are bouncing around everywhere from radio and tv stations. Why couldn't I set up my own signal at a different strength, greater than that background, and let the mousebody antenna pick up and retransmit that instead? If the original signal were strong enough, it might be retransmitted with enough strength to be detected. This raises one question: can I assume that the signal transmitted by the mouse is at the same frequency as the original signal or is this a nonlinear mouse? If the transmitted signal is different, detecting it detects the mouse.

If it looks like a cat, walks like a cat and eats like a cat, it could well be a cat.

Take may original advice and install a webcam. Then we can see if it is a mouse, a cat or a rat :-)

At your stated budget of $30 ? Nil !

Factors involved are: surface, signal strength, frequency and amount of coupling. The signal usually is 'mains' for the most part. But a nearby AM station..... :-)

That would require a rather big transmitter. With the mouse bouncing off just say 1E-6 of the signal. I.e. it's there, but you need very expensive gear to detect it.

Your mouse is linear while eating, non-lineair while running :-)

Doppler causes the reflected signal to change proportional to speed. I guess, you don't drive a car ? (Or you live in an area without speed control camera's :-)

Yes. You could even use ultrasound to detect the mouses presence. Quite some cheap burglary detectors operate on this principle. You would need to modify a ready build one though because manufacturers take great care _not_ to trigger on mice :-)

This is a most entertaining thread- much more so than politics!. The mouse is likely to die of old age before you work out a (free, / minimal cost) detection device - besides, the habits of mice are well known so there is little point in conducting reearch in this field. Borrow a cat, set baits, buy a mousetrap - just get rid of it before it does some harm (as has been well documented - they are a known disease vector) If you want to know where its getting in, spread lines of talcum powder (or flour) along the walls and see which are distured

- with any luck you will be able to track it back to its point of entry. And there is no such thing as 1 mice - there will be heaps of them, so get rid of them as fast as you can. 73 de VK3BFA Andrew

It is gratifying to know that the mouse will not survive my experiments.

That might work in an empty room, but I live in a tiny apartment with very little free space and a number of rugs. I simply can't spread talcum powder around, particularly along the walls, and I wouldn't be able to see the footprints if I did. Moreover, I'm not sure that my own walking wouldn't kick up talcum powder dust which is probably not good for me to breathe.

I have no doubt that there are zillions of them in the walls. Nor do I doubt that they will always be there, since everyone is the building is doing all the right things in their own apartments and none of those things have any effect on mice not actually in their apartments. I only have evidence of one mouse actually entering my apartment and that mouse, or mice in case I'm wrong about the actual number, is(are) the only one(s) I have any hope of controlling.

If there isn't a cheap electronic way to figure out what is going on with the mouse, I'll try some mechanical (read: Rube Goldberg) devices of my own invention. They may not capture the mouse but they will present it with ineffectual persecution in the form of problems of varying levels of difficulty and inconvenience that it has to solve to get in and out of the kitchen, but which don't actually prevent it from doing so if it really wants to. I have one such contraption set up right now, the second in a series of such. However, since it doesn't involve electronics, I won't discuss it here.

Unfortunately, I also have to solve the same problems to get in and out of the kitchen, but at least I know the answers.

I don't believe it is as difficult or expensive as people are saying to come up with electronic solutions, so I'll keep thinking about that and maybe try some other newsgroups.

there.

thinking

Talking about taking pictures of a mouse or anything else makes one think of that now old fashioned expression for photography, "Taking a snap". Obviously based on the 'click' that a cameras make (or used to make!). These days 'click' has an entirely different meaning pertaining to an entirely different sort of mouse! However having disposed of three such 'varmints' as the colder fall weather occurred, the only 'snap' I want to hear is a good old fashioned spring trap. I've still got six such traps out and baited but thankfully no more mice. Terry. PS. There is always the possibility of feeding the cat some cheese and have it sit near the mouse hole with 'baited' breath!

I've used the spring traps in the past and found that they have a tendency to go off in my hand, sometimes causing injury. If I were to design a better mouse trap, one innovation would be to make it possible to set the trap by turning a knob instead of having to put one's fingers where the rat is supposed to be.

Dying of old age is not the same as surviving an experiment. Except, of course, if the mouse laughs so much he bursts a blood vessel in his head, that is...

Gadzooks, sir - must I explain in detail that which should be obvious?

the mice are deluding you - they are walking in each others footprints in order to maintain the illusion of "one"

An electronic solution would be to move your pc into the kitchen, leave it connected to this newsgroup and wait for the mouse to engage in metaphysical debate with you. By sheer force of intellect in a subesequent correspondence, you will be able to persuade them to leave.

Youve figured out the door principle, right?

No, if you have a lifelong interest in electronics and a shed full of "things that will come in usefull one day" it would not be difficult or expensive - besides, what is mere money and effort compared to besting a cunning rodent?