Fetchez La Cottonball!

Very quiet week. No kills, no false positives, nothing. So I just dropped a moist cottonball into the Zapper. Science marches on.

Moist Cottonballs?

A faithful reader (now there are two!) sent this tip: moist cottonballs as bait.

Worth a try. Of course we'll have to define the protocol, set up a control group, get some NIH funding...stay tuned.

Repeated False Positives Yesterday

The missus tracked it down to a piece of kibble that had lodged in the trigger mechanism.

False Positive Saturday Night

Yesterday, we moved the Zapper back to the old location.

No News Is No News

No action. The Zapper is still in the new location. The missus reports a couple of mouse sightings. We're talking about moving the Zapper back where it was. It's a lazy, disjointed conversation.

Taking The War To The Evildoers

We've been keeping the Zapper in the northwest corner of our backyard. We moved it a few times, but always within the same small area.

Yesterday evening, the missus saw a mouse in the southeast corner of the yard. So we moved the Zapper over there. No action yet.

False Positive

Research!

Gotta love the web. I googled "rat mouse" and the first result was this quiz. I scored 8 out of 12 right! That gets me a doctorate at a state school, no?

The tips link is helpful, too. I think we're facing the dread young rat-adult mouse conundrum.

And how cool is it that ratbehavior.org is out there, waiting for nutjobs like me to find it?

Death In The Afternoon

Okay, it was evening. But what's a blog without the occasional gratuitous literary reference?

Kill #5. Once again, it was either a big mouse or a modest rat. (I'm really going to have to spend five minutes on research one of these days.) A little trouble shaking the body into the plastic bag, but it hit the ground with a satisfying thump when it finally came loose. Freaked out the missus, big time.

False Positive

Up And Running

The RZ is back online. No more immediate false positive. The game is afoot.