Mice invade Makakilo
By Robbie Dingeman
Advertiser Health Writer
Makakilo residents say mice have been wandering out of the hillside and into their homes in the past week, with some folks catching half a dozen of the invading critters each night.
• Get rid of their food sources around the house and yard. • Reduce clutter so they don't have a hiding place. • Eliminate sources of fresh water. • Set out traps.
Some advice • Snap traps work better outside because dust sometimes get into glue traps. • Be cautious about using poison around children or animals. Source: State Health Department
Resident Mike Bambadji, who lives on Kohupono Street, said his 12 cats alerted him to the problem, bringing him 30 dead mice since last week. "This is unusual. I've never seen anything like this," he said yesterday.
Ways to keep the mice away
Bambadji and wife Theresa have lived in their house since 1988 without any previous rodent problem.
"There's much more," he said. "That means the whole neighborhood is loaded with mice."
Stores in the area said they have seen an increase in the sales of traps and poison in the past two weeks. At Ace Pioneer Hardware in Kapolei, cashier Brittany Montilliano said more people are buying traps than usual. "From what I've seen, people are buying the sticky mousetraps," she said.
State Department of Health spokeswoman Janice Okubo said department workers set out traps in Makakilo, Nanakuli, Wai'anae and Ma'ili as part of routine monitoring and noticed an increase in mice in Makakilo since Monday.
"Some of the traps have collected between five and 12 mice," Okubo said, but she didn't have a tally late yesterday of the total number caught this week.
Entomologist George Kitaguchi, who works in the vector control branch of the state Health Department, said a sudden increase in mice could be a side effect of the wet winter.
"When there's a lot of rain, the grass flourishes. This provides food for a lot of mice," he said. When the weather turns warm and dry, the food supply dwindles, sending the mice out of fields and grassy areas and into neighborhoods in search of food, Kitaguchi said.
Normally, O'ahu doesn't see as many problems with mice invasions as the Neighbor Islands do, he said, because "everything is more urbanized now."
But longtime Makakilo residents may recall the summer invasion of 1982 when some people talked about catching as many as 30 mice in a four-hour period. So far, Kitaguchi said, this latest episode doesn't seem that bad.
Mike Bambadji said there are so many mice in his neighborhood, cars sometimes run over them at night. His wife, Theresa, said she's seen mice at her mother's house, in another part of Makakilo. She said some of the mice crept into a birdcage where she saw "four or five drinking out of the water."
Kitaguchi said the best defense against these common mice, or Mus domesticus, is to clean up in and around the house, leaving them no food, water or shelter so they go someplace else.
Although it's tempting to think about going after the mice in the hills, Kitaguchi advises that "people should just concentrate on their own immediate area."
Reach Robbie Dingeman at rdingeman@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-2429.
