Moles and Mice

Caught probably 40 mice in my pole barn in the fall with the 5 gallon bucket trap.

Now using snap traps and I’m catching moles (and mice).

I thought moles stayed underground during winter? Yes/No?

First thing that came to mind. Name that movie.

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Maybe you’re catching shrews, not moles. Dark silver fur, short tails, very pointed noses.

I believe he gave her a quarter to have a rat chew it off, not moles or mice.

tindall got it.
I bet it’s shrews.I’ve been catching them about 3 yrs.
How the hell do you get rid of them.

Shrews are tiny meat eaters. I like them.

Shrews.

I catch them sometimes in snap traps. Also back when I used to use many snap traps vs a bucket, I would have a shrew infestation in the garage because they like to eat the dead(and even alive…) mice that are stuck in the trap. They are interesting little critters. Their heart beats I want to say something like 150-200 bpm at rest. They basically cannot slow down and need to constantly eat to maintain their energy and stay alive. They’ll eat meat, fruit, seeds, insects, plants, worms. Basically anything.

I do however notice when there are a lot of shrews around, the garage will reek to high heaven with their signature stinky musk smell, which I think the secrete from glands on their underside.

Short-tailed shrews are the species we have. A vole looks more like a mouse with a short tail. A shrew looks like a vole but with eyes that are almost not even visible(they rely heavily on vibration and smell as their main senses)- they’re basically blind. A mole looks like a shrew with big old claws for digging and a disgusting face… lol.

One cool thing about shrews is they are NOT rodents. They are little carnivorous mammals! They don’t have rodent teeth, but in fact little cone-shaped “canine” teeth for tearing and molars for chewing. I’m just going off what I remember reading so I could be off on some of this. Think I’ll go dig up a vid about them and post it here.

Oh yeah… and they’re VENOMOUS. Guess they use echolocation like a bat and have bad sense of smell…oops.

So I’ve had snap traps disappear on me…obviously I caught something and either they ran off (maybe just a leg caught), or something carried whatever was caught off. You think most likely it was a shrew that carried a caught mouse off?

Actually, yesterday I found one of my snap traps a few feet away from where it was, the mouse? was dismembered and in a few different parts..

I once had a snap trap disappear in our utility room. I looked all over for that SOB. Finally found it a few days later when it started to smell. The mouse had dragged it 10′ across the room and up onto the compressor of our chest freezer where it finally died!