Beware, winter is coming and the mice are out in full force trying every trick they know to get into your home or, even better, your garage. There are many reasons mice prefer a garage to a house. Many garages of people who are retired or who don’t own a car are used for storage and that storage is rarely checked on. Newspapers and boxes of clothes are great for mice. They can make a very warm nest with that while ruining the material with their feces and urine. Mice bring food into their nests, defecate and urinate in it. They are filthy creatures and anything they walk on, especially food will be coated in dangerous bacteria. It is very easy to get food poisoning from a mouse infestation even in your garage.
Having a car in the garage can also attract mice. If you do not use the car, they will infest it and if you use the car regularly they will still infest it. Mice love cars. Especially a car you drive every day. They will wait in your garage, hidden, waiting for you to get in your car and leave for the day. When you return your car will be very warm, mainly because the radiator remains hot all through the night if you drove the car a good distance that day. Mice can feel the heat coming from the car and will infest it. They usually infest the engine but will also infest other parts of the car. It is the same situation as having them in the attic or inside the walls of your house. They will chew on wires that will damage your car, the radio may stop working because the mice chewed through the wires. They do this not for fun but to grind down their ever-growing incisors. This will result in feces all over the engine and likely in the car, extensive damage and the chance that your brand new, high-tech car with the electronic starter now won’t turn on at all. An old-fashioned car can still be infested but there are no wires to chew, only a break line. Which they will chew.
Most garages are not heated so the mice are there just to get out of the wind and snow. If your garage is insulated then they will nest in that, if it’s made of concrete and is not insulated they will hide in any opening or crevice they can find. If you store things in boxes or cabinets, especially if you store any kind of food that is not sealed in a tight-fitting container made of glass, metal or something else strong enough that a mouse could not chew through, then the mice will most definitely infest it and ruin the food. Do not eat any food you think may have been touched by a mouse. Mice defecate and urinate on food while they eat it and that can cause severe food poisoning or worse.
If you have mice in your garage then you should take action before they spread and get into your house. If they are there in the winter and then leave when it gets warm they are likely wild mice like field mice or deer mice. Deer mice have an extra level of danger by being able to pass on deer ticks to pets and humans. A deer tick is very dangerous and can cause Lyme Disease which is incurable after 24 hours of incubation in the body. If they stay past the winter and remain throughout the summer they are likely to house mice, just as dangerous as wild mice.
In order to get rid of the mice that have infested your garage, you will need to take a number of steps. The first step is to remove the things they came for. If they like living in your car, take it out of the garage and park it outside where it is too cold for them to infest. Remove any and all food and garbage. Make sure the garbage is sealed tightly in a container that locks and is tamper-proof from both mice and larger wild animals. Make sure to keep your lawn clear of debris and to keep your grass short. If there is a lot of snow on the ground shovel it, anything to take away their ability to hid. You will then want to take the next step of using either humane capture traps which will take much longer, or you can use snap traps, which are far faster and more effective. When you set them up put them everywhere and bait them with shrimp shells. Lock the doors to the garage and don’t let anyone in for a week. Then go in and count the number of mice that have been caught. If it’s more than three you may have a serious infestation. At that point, you will want to hire a professional rodent technician to deal with the issue permanently.
