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Mice keep returning home 

The incredible journey: Marathon mice keep coming back for more

mouse with suitcaseIf recent sales figures for live-release mouse traps are any indication, the number of cottagers looking for a guilt-free rodent-removal system is on the rise. Instead of exterminating cottage rodents with poison or the snap of a trap, live-release devices simply imprison the mice until they can be released away from the cottage.

While the idea of returning rehabilitated rodents to the wilderness is a noble one, Cottage Life has recently come upon some evidence that the practice may also be futile.

First published in a Federation of Ontario Naturalists Bulletin in 1959, and now archived at the Algonquin Park Museum’s reprint library, “Homing Mice” by Russ Rutter documents how mice that were live-trapped and released made their way back to the trap site.

Rutter, who was with the Department of Lands and Forests (now the Ministry of Natural Resources), captured mice in his Huntsville basement, marked them, and began releasing the critters at varying distances and in varying directions from his home.

“Sometimes I went on foot and sometimes by car, and besides keeping the mouse in [a jar in] my pocket, I did everything else I could think of to confuse it, such as driving along the highway and turning off at right angles on a side road,” he wrote.

In one instance, mouse #8 - a long-tailed deer mouse - was recaptured at least eight times, returning from as far away as three-quarters of a kilometre. (It took the mouse 10 days.) “Field workers, testing the homing instincts of mice, have assumed that they were being trapped on their home range,” he wrote, “and if they were taken away and came back they were just returning home. My subjects may have been in their general home area, but they were not living in my basement, as they were always caught within a matter of hours of their first entry.”

Rutter calculated that on the basis of relative size, three-quarters of a kilometre for a mouse would be roughly 19 km for us. His logbook records mice covering this distance in as little as three or four days, a remarkable feat considering that mice are almost entirely nocturnal.

“I’m afraid that until satisfactory proof to the contrary is forthcoming,” Rutter wrote, “1 shall continue to think that mammals, and probably birds and insects, have a ‘sixth sense’ which will forever defy elucidation by science.”

So if you’re a live-trapper and your place by the lake seems to be overrun by rodents, look again. It could be the same mouse you caught last week coming back for more

by David Zimmer

Published in the May 1994 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

Copyright © 1994, 2008 by Cottage Life. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any article, photograph, or artwork, for other than personal use, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publisher is strictly forbidden.