There seems to be no end to the supply of mice living around my back deck and hot tub. I have captured and released something very near 50 of them in the last five weeks. If you are keeping track, that's a lot.
If I
had my druthers, they would be living over at Billy's place, and a bunch (can
we call them a herd?) of hummingbirds would surround my deck.
It's
not because a mouse is particularly intimidating. In fact, if you met just one
out in the yard, you'd probably find the tiny fellow rather endearing. Twitchy pink ears. Bright eyes. Busy whiskers.
This
is no grizzly bear.
But
ultimately, they are after my peanut butter cookies. And as you can judge by
the number I have captured, they procreate like mad.
A
female mouse reaches maturity in only six to eight weeks. Her gestation lasts a
mere nineteen to twenty-one days, and she typically produces five to eight
pups. Under favorable conditions, she can become pregnant again within a day
after giving birth.
That
schedule doesn't leave much room on her calendar for hobbies.
Suppose
you start with one healthy pair of adult mice in the throes of rodent love.
Three weeks later, six pups arrive. Three weeks after that, another six. Two
months in, fourteen mice isn't exactly a furry apocalypse.
Then
the daughters grow up.
About
six to eight weeks after they're born, they begin having litters of their own.
Suddenly, reproduction isn't happening one family at a time. It's happening
several families at once.
By
the end of the third month, you might have thirty or forty mice. By the fourth
month, it's easy to top a hundred. Five months in, several hundred isn't out of
the question. By six months, under ideal conditions with plenty of food,
warmth, and shelter, the descendants of that single pair could number well over
a thousand.
I
don't have that many cookies. So, I trap and relocate.
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