This is a picture that I took of a deer mouse that was living in my house last winter around this time of year. I manipulated the photo with Gimp.
He started coming inside to get out of the cold sporadically during the day. Because we were in the middle of renovating the place at the time we decided to let him stay since there were holes leading to the outside all over the place and we weren’t going to seal them up anytime soon. We started calling him Scarface because it looked like his left eye had been gouged out or injured in some manner.
Scarface eventually moved in full time and made a nest underneath our washing machine. We would hear him during the night scratching and climbing on the metal underneath the washer, that sound always made us smile. Eventually he became very friendly. He would come up to us and eat bread out of our hand and stare at us for hours. When staring at us he would always stand on the same brick by the fireplace. When our human conversations got really loud or boisterous he would actually stand on his hind legs and start to rub his tiny mouse hands together like he was keeping them warm or something. Suffice it to say he was really growing on us and was starting to become part of the family.
Months passed by as winter became spring and one day little Scarface went missing. We looked everywhere for him and eventually spotted him outside by the pit. He was climbing the juniper trees, breaking off branches and making a nest outside! Obviously we were sad to see him go, but hey that’s the way of the beast, one day they’re standing up laughing at your jokes, the next they’re dancing on the rim of a pit. Until…
A day later Scarface popped his head in through the front door. Full of joy, I ran over to him, but as I got closer I could see clearly there was something wrong. There were three huge tumors coming out of Scarface’s butt.
I leaned in more to get a closer look and to my astonishment the tumors weren’t tumors at all, they were three baby mice coming out of his butt!.. Then it came to me, Scarface was a SHE not a HE! Scareface was a mother!!! And those babies were breastfeeding while being dragged across the floor by the proud new mother.
Scareface had come back to the house to bring her children to the nest underneath the washer and trusted me enough to walk right in front of me with the most valuable things in her life… her children.
Unfortunately for Scarface the house was almost fully renovated, meaning all the holes had been sealed up and 4 mice living in one house was not going to be possible, or appropriate… plus the mouse droppings underneath the washer were beginning to stink really really bad. So the next day when Scarface was out getting another branch from outside for the nest, we moved the old washer with the babies still inside of it to the driveway hoping that Scarface would retrieve them and start a new nest somewhere outside. Instead what happened was Scarface could not find them because she was a stupid mouse and eventually a neighbor dog ate one of the babies and the other two died from exposure…
Anyway, the lesson is… I unintentionally killed a family who trusted me, and even though it’s a mouse family it still really sucks.
Merry Christmas!
http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/rodents/