A house mouse will enter a building for a variety of reasons, including warmth, food and safety. Once they are inside, if the conditions are right, it will start a nest, and soon enough, the building will be teeming with rodents. But how do these mice enter the home? Let’s find out.
How good are mice at jumping and climbing?
Mice are excellent when it comes to jumping and climbing. They will scale furniture, countertops, landscape features, stairs, and pretty much any vertical surface. If they find some kind of roughness in the exterior of your walls, such as they would find on stucco, wood and panels, they will climb it. Smooth vertical surfaces however are much harder for them to scale, since they cannot latch onto anything. They can also use ropes, wires and pipes as pathways, along with ivies and other scaling plants. Basically, if a mouse wants to be inside your home, it will find a way.
In terms of jumping, mice can leap up to two feet, from tables to countertops and bookshelves. This is why during mouse prevention measures, you do not want to overlook any surface, no matter how out of reach it seems. Make sure that you remove food sources, or anything that can be contaminated from the reach of these acrobats.
How tight a space can a mouse fit through?
It often seems that mice do not have any bones in their bodies when you consider the spaces that they can fit through. However, that is only partially true. Mice have a collapsible skeleton, which allows them to fit through very small gaps in the exterior wall of the home. Basically, the only limitation on a mouse’s ability to infiltrate is its skull. It is the only bone structure in its body which it cannot collapse.
To give you a perspective, mice are so agile that they can squeeze through a gap that is the width of a pencil. That makes your job of mouse infestation prevention that much harder, since the width of a pencil can be very hard to spot with the naked eye. Still, you have to be very vigilant and observative when sealing all the gaps in your exterior walls during a pest prevention initiative. If you’d like, we can help you out. We have the expertise and experience needed to pest proof a home and remove any rodent infestation. Contact us today if you have mice problems.
