How Do You Know If You Have Mice in Greenwich?

Why Mice Get Missed for Months

Rat evidence announces itself. Mouse evidence has to be looked for, and every individual sign has an innocent explanation that most people reach for first.

Any one of those is genuinely ambiguous. Two or three of them together, in the same part of the house, are not - and that is the pattern worth watching for rather than any single find.

The Signs, in the Order People Usually Notice Them

1. Droppings in cupboards and drawers. Very small, dark, and scattered rather than gathered - mice do not use a single route the way rats do, so the evidence spreads. Low kitchen cupboards, the cupboard under the sink and the back of a food cupboard are the usual first finds.
2. Gnawed packaging. A neat hole in the corner of a cereal box, a bag of pasta, a dog food sack. The hole is small and the rest of the packet is usually undisturbed, which is what distinguishes it from most other damage.
3. Light, quick noise. Behind a kitchen unit, inside a stud wall, above a ceiling. Faster and lighter than rat activity and often described as scuttling rather than thumping.
4. Nesting material. Insulation, cardboard, paper or fabric pulled apart and gathered in a void, behind an appliance or in a boxed-in space.
5. A stale, musky smell in an enclosed cupboard. Strongest where the nesting is rather than where the droppings are, which is why it sometimes leads you somewhere the droppings did not.
6. A pet fixating on one spot. A cat or dog sitting at a particular kickboard or appliance gap for no obvious reason is worth taking seriously. They are usually right.

What Else It Might Be

Worth ruling out before you act, because a treatment aimed at the wrong animal is money spent for nothing.

• Rats. Larger droppings gathered along a run rather than scattered, a dark greasy smear along a wall, gnawing on non-food materials, burrows outside. Same price, different treatment.
• Squirrels. Heavy movement in a loft during daylight, insulation torn up near the eaves, damage at the roofline. A different service with a legal framework of its own.
• Birds in the eaves. Activity in spring, audible during the day, concentrated at the edge of the roof rather than moving through the void.
• The building itself. Timber contracting as heating goes off produces a surprisingly convincing single click or crack. What it does not produce is droppings.

Two Things You Can Do This Week

Put a thin dusting of flour down

Across the kickboard gap, in the back of the cupboard, along the skirting behind the fridge. Leave it overnight. Tracks in the morning tell you a route is in current use - which is more useful than droppings, because droppings might be from last month.

Clean one area completely and watch it

Clear the droppings from a single cupboard, note the date, and look again in three or four days. Fresh droppings in a cleaned area are current activity and settle the question. This is worth doing precisely because old droppings are what make people uncertain about whether a problem is live.

One Mouse or a Problem?

The question everyone asks, and the honest answer is that a single mouse wandering in through an open door in autumn does happen - but it is much rarer than people hope.

Mice keep several nesting sites going in one property and produce young at a rate that means a solitary animal is unusual. If you have found droppings in more than one place, or activity has been noticed over more than a few days, assume it is a population rather than a visitor.

The reason that matters is practical rather than alarming. A single trap where you found the droppings addresses a visitor. It does not address a network, and mistaking one for the other is the commonest reason a kitchen goes quiet for a fortnight and then does not.

When It Is Worth Calling

• Droppings in more than one location.
• Any evidence in a food preparation or storage area.
• Activity that has continued after traps or shop-bought bait have been tried.
• Gnawing anywhere near cabling.
• A property where the neighbours have mentioned the same thing - in a flat or a terrace that changes what the job actually is.

If You Rent, or If You Are the Landlord

Mouse activity in a let property tends to get reported late, for reasons that have nothing to do with the mice.

If you are a tenant: report it early and in writing, with photographs. Mice in a property are very often a building matter - an open service penetration, a defective air brick, a kickboard void open to the subfloor - rather than anything to do with how a home is kept. Waiting because you are worried about being blamed is how a small problem becomes an established one.

If you are a landlord or agent: the useful thing to establish early is whether the routes belong to the property or to the building. In a house they usually belong to the property and can be closed. In a flat they are frequently in shared structure, which changes who needs to instruct the work.

Either way, the published price means the applicable figure can be checked before the enquiry is made rather than after a survey.