The first mouse was gnawing the wire at the end of the trap before midnight. Careful reading of the detailed opus magnum The Mammals of the Southern African Sub-region, identified it as Namaqua rock mouse, Micaelamys namaquensis. It was a beautiful creature, a bit like an over sized Scandinavian Yeallow-necked mouse Apodemus flavicollis (fin. metsähiiri): big ears and a long tail.
We got kids up from their beds (but not India!) to have look, before we took it out and released it far from the house. We set the trap again in the same spot.
Now that the inside of the trap smelled of mouse already, the others had problems in getting in and getting caught. At 1:30 AM and 3 AM again we had to get up and repeat the procedure. After that the attic was silent.
According to the book, the Namaqua rock mice are social and partly arboreal. It certainly looks so! We had a total of 4 (one was caught earlier) identical-looking mice living under the attic floorboards for no-one knows how long. They must have got in when the windows were open or where not installed yet. They looked like they might be from the same litter (average litter size is around 3).
2 comments:
Namaqua rock mouse, not rat. Although they were big, they had a bigger head and eyes than rats do.
I changed the text so that it talks about mice only.
Taxonomically, I a biologist after all :) , rats and mice are not well differentiated from each other. They are both members of family Muridae. Peple usually call migger, stout looking creatures rats and smalled ones mice.
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