With winter now in full swing, mouse and rodent problems tend to be on the rise. This post covers what to do if you find mouse droppings in your home.
4 steps of what to do if you find mouse droppings in your home
1. Identify
The first step is to identify if they are really mouse droppings or potentially other kinds of pest droppings. Sometimes rat, bat, or even roach droppings can be confused for mouse droppings.
Mouse droppings will often look like black grains of rice. Rat droppings are similar to mouse droppings but are usually wider and longer. Bat droppings are similar to mouse droppings as well, but they often can contain partially digested insects. Also, their locations tend to be more specific to where bats live, such as attics, chimneys, sheds, and below eaves and overhangs of your home.
Roach droppings are smaller than mouse droppings and can look like little specs. They can appear similar to ground black pepper or ground coffee. Determining which is which can be difficult for even trained professionals. If you aren’t sure, reach out to a pest control service if you suspect pest issues.
2. Location
In addition to what the droppings look like, the location in which they are found is another major factor. Bat droppings are rarely found where you could find rat, mouse or roach droppings. However, you may find the latter in areas that bat droppings could be found.
For example, mouse droppings can be found in and around places like kitchen cabinets, food storage areas, furnaces, water heaters, appliances, holes in walls, attics, crawl spaces, and many other locations in your home.
Rat and roach droppings can also be found in these places. However, bat droppings are limited to where they live around your home. With many of the locations where mouse droppings can overlap with other pests, location alone can be hard to use as a specific determining factor as to what kind of pest you are dealing with.
3. Clean Up
Once you have determined what type of pest you have, clean up should be another step towards making your home safe again. One thing that people often overlook is realizing most droppings require more than simply vacuuming or sweeping up pest droppings.
The problem is that these droppings could contain various diseases. You’ll want to do a little more than simply throwing them away. When you vacuum them up without an appropriate filter, it can spread diseases into the air. This could unintentionally spread bacteria while you are vacuuming other parts of your home.
You’ll want to make sure that you sanitize the areas where you find pest droppings in addition to just cleaning them up in order to avoid any potential spread of disease.
4. Removal
The final step you should focus on for what to do if you find mouse droppings in your home is removal of the pests. As a starting point, you will want to seal off the entry points to where these pests are getting into your home.
Once you remove the pest issues, the last thing you want to have happen is to have new pests come right back in, so sealing off how the original pests got in your home is important. You’ll want to start with common entry points like under doors and windows, as well as major cracks and crevices around your home.
In addition to that, you’ll want to remove the pests themselves. Setting the appropriate traps, bait, or product treatments is the next step for getting rid of pests. You’ll need to treat each pest with specific treatments. If you treat for the wrong thing, it can be ineffective.
This is why proper identification of pests is very important. As stated above, this proper identification can even be difficult for trained professionals and can take some time. For this reason and other complications mentioned above, we recommend reaching out to a pest control service rather than trying to remove pests on your own to ensure the best results.
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