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How high can a mouse jump?

The New Neo Posted on by

Very high indeed:

Average mice can jump anywhere up to about 13 inches without a running start and even higher when they’re already moving. The average 5-gallon bucket is about 12 inches tall, meaning it is not tall enough to contain a mouse. It will leap out without a lid on it. Of course, every mouse is different, and some of the worst jumpers have been recorded jumping about 10 inches high.

That is a powerful jump coming from such a small creature.

It’s no secret that I can’t stand mice. They’re okay in the wild, because they keep to themselves. But in the house? No, not on my watch. And yet it’s happened again.

The other evening I saw another one very late at night, out in the open in my living room near where I’ve seen them in the past. I have no idea how they get in, and no one has been able to figure it out. But this sort of weather, when it suddenly gets quite cold at night, is prime time. Traps are now set, and the wait begins.

But the reason I’m writing about this is that when I saw this particular mousie, I did what I usually do – made a lot of noise to scare it away. I stomped and I clapped. I must have really startled the mouse because it did what I’ve never before seen a mouse do – it leapt vertically in its fear, a jump that would do an NBA player proud pound for pound. I’d say this mouse jumped at least ten inches straight up from a non-running start. That startled me, to be sure.

NOTE: One of my very favorite poems:

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! …

Comments

How high can a mouse jump? — 54 Comments

  1. I might have told this story here before. If I have, please excuse the repetition.

    I was camping on the beach in CA once. Not AT the beach, but right on a very isolated beach near San Simeon. It was late, dark, moonless, but a mild night. And I’m a very sound sleeper, often with my mouth open.

    I woke up to something tickling the inside of my mouth. You can see this coming, right?

    It took me a few seconds to realize what was going on, and I was — understandably — quite angry. And disgusted. But not ready to wake up — I just rolled over and went back to sleep.

    For a few seconds, when I realized what had just transpired. Ugh. I picked up my bedroll and got into the car, where I could have a door between be and little vermin. It was worse thinking about it. the next morning than when it happened.

  2. I was sitting reading in my family room one night when I looked up and saw a mouse quietly making his way along the book case opposite me. I didn’t move, just looked at him. He looked over and saw me looking and jumped about 8 inches in the air. I didn’t mind mice so much as rats. I had an infestation of roof rats one time and had some adventures with traps in the attic.

  3. In the first place my wife and I lived (a condo) we had three cats and a dog. All the pets and I were in the living room when a mouse ran along the wall. Completely unnoticed by all the cats and the dog.

    The pets were good training for having kids, especially when they had chores to do.

  4. Two of the sweetest pets my daughter ever had were a couple of gal hooded rats.

    You can contrast that with being bitten awake. Hunted that bastard down for two solid days.

    Still liked the girls.

  5. @JFM: Thanks, reminds me of Sadie.

    Mini dach of mine. If she spotted a mouse, she’d find wherever it went into hiding and sit there frozen for hours until it came out then snap!, she’d have it.

    Outside, she’d run down rabbits. Very cool. Looked like a sidewinder missile after a jet.

  6. When I was kid, I woke up in the middle of the night to a mouse, sleeping on my head. Did I scream!! My dad was scared something terrible had happened. I washed my head until it was raw.

  8. We’re also had mice that set up household in our kitchen drawers: the silverware drawer was where they pooped. They used one drawer as a pantry: it had piles of dog food, peanut brittle, potato chips, it. And another drawer seemed to be a nest: dog hair, feathers, stuffing.

    One mouse nabbed a bunch of peanut brittle and carried it into the planter and are in the lovely garden.

    (My mom was a school teacher and every Christmas got boxes and boxes of peanut brittle. Only the mice actually liked it.)

  9. The dishwasher latch seemed to be broken. The repairman came out, removed the washer from under the counter, and found that the latch was jammed – with dog food. Apparently a mouse had gotten in there and was using it to store food.
    Also I think I saw one teleport once – it ran behind something, never came out, and wasn’t there when I looked.

  13. At first I was sure we were going to have a series of the “unanswerables.”
    How long is a piece of string?
    Is it farther to Dallas or by bus?

    That sort of thing… 😉

  14. We had a big Labrador retriever when the kids were growing up. Take down a deer, no problem. Grab a big snarling raccoon by the throat and shake him like a rag doll, piece of cake.

    But a mouse that ran between his feet? Dog-equivalent of pole vault just to get away.

  15. SCOTTtheBADGER:

    Believe me, I did both Olivia and myself a favor by not keeping her. And a worse thing than a live mouse in the house is a dead one brought to you by a cat.

  16. Bill K:

    My lab, Ollie, had a thing for armadillos. He’d walk over and bite them across the middle taking a chunk out of the spine like a staple puller.

  17. Good thing too, Oligonicella.
    Armadillos are the only known reservoir of leprosy outside of humans, at least in the US. For a long time, they were not thought to communicate leprosy to humans, but there is now evidence that they do. The problem is that Mycobacterium leprae has the longest generation time and the longest latent infectious period of any known bacterium, resulting in difficulty in determining the mode of transmission. Even within families, overt infection oftentimes is many years after contact.

  18. And as a side note, the other known animal that can be inoculated with Mycobacterium leprae and allow multiplication of the bacteria is the mouse, within its footpads. (Though it cannot be transmiited to humans from such.) At one time, this was used as a medical diagnostic test.

    So there you go, all who dislike mice – a link to the world’s oldest infectious disease!

  19. We once had a wonderful indoor/outdoor cat. He came home through a window that we left slightly ajar.The window was about five feet off the ground. We lived close to the canal near Ballard in Seattle. One night our dear cat brought home for our entertainment a live wharf rat!

    Yeah, yahoo! That window was in our bedroom and when he and the rat arrived they dropped to the floor. Dear cat had a hold of the rat until he hit the floor. It was at that moment that I left the room! You can bet I was the first one out of there! Yes sir! I left those two guys (DH and cat) in that room by themselves to manage “the problem” Squeals, yells, swearing, furniture moving, and finally I heard: “you brought that damn thing in here you get it out!” Fortunately we did have an outside door in the bedroom so my DH and my dear cat finally were able to rid our home of that gigantic wharf rat! In the meantime, I waited in the kitchen and poured myself a nice little snifter of something strong!

  20. My more memorable experience is with bats, which are sort of mice with wings (as the Germans call a bat “fledermaus”). I learned the hard way that a bat can flatten itself to be able to slide under a door. I was visiting friends in the Berkshires, and was in the bathroom with the door closed, and I heard a sort of rustling sound from the door, and something black emerging from the bottom of the door. That something turned into a bat and started flying around. The space under the door couldn’t have been more than a quarter of an inch. I opened the window and got out of the bathroom, closing the door behind me, and never saw it again.

  21. Jimmy, we also had 4 or 5 bats invade after leaving a window open without a screen (= dumb dumb dumb). Found and removed 2 or 3.
    Came back after several weeks absence and found one dead in the toilet (flushed = no problem); one alive under the down toilet lid, and it was still alive enough to fly around but we managed to get it to fly out the door.

    But when changing the AC filter I saw some funny fluffyness on the underside. “How did that get there and why?” Then it occurred to me it might be due to another bat, which I found (dead) in the air return duct just under the filter. Somehow it had entered a grill with slots no more than 1/4 inch by 1.25″ opening, too. But it could not penetrate the filter material and its metal screen. If it had gotten through, it would have been stopped by the refrigerant coil assembly.

  22. Not too surprisingly out in the Wyoming ranchlands, the historical site where we worked this summer has a significant rodent problem, despite the best efforts of the resident snakes (stories for a different thread….).

    All of our buildings are outfitted with large plastic buckets with a gizmo on top consisting of a rod laid along the diameter and fastened at the sides so that it can still spin, passing through a hole in the center of a 3″x3″ piece of thin plywood which is baited with smears of peanut butter, and some wooden “ramps” from the ground to the ends of the rods.

    Unless the rodent is an acrobatic prodigy, running along the rod to reach the PB results in a quick trip to the bottom of the bucket, which is filled with about three inches of water.
    If any prisoners escape by jumping out, we would never know it, but I’ve personally seen one bucket holding 2 dead rats, and AesopSpouse has disposed of smaller vermin. Just about all of the missionaries had the same experience, as emptying and rebaiting/rewatering is a standard chore on our cleaning schedule.

    For prevention of infestation, I recommend something I found on the internet (where else?) when we were preparing to leave last spring.

    The previous summer, after only a 2 week vacation, we returned to find plentiful trails of mouse droppings, and then we actually saw the brazen hussies crossing the floor of fully lit rooms with us just staring at them. Cleaning and trapping ensued with the usual commercial items (not being aware of the bucket trick yet), but we were very concerned about the state of the house after our coming absence of 6 months.

    The advice was that mice hated the smell of mint and cloves, so we scattered peppermint tea bags throughout the house along with whole cloves in “bags” made of cheap knee-high nylons by knotting the tops closed.

    We were still a bit surprised to get home and find ZERO indications that the mice used our home for a playground!

    https://pestkill.org/mice/bucket-trap/

  24. }}} One of my very favorite poems:

    NOT B Kliban?

    Love to eat them mousies
    Mousies’ what I love to eat
    Bite they little heads off,
    Nibble on they tiny feet.

    😀

    OK, question, what “bait” did you set your traps with?

    According to good authority (friend of mine was one of the world’s top experts on Seed Beetles, worked for 20-odd years at the Smithsonian — paid for his college as a pest control specialist), as well as my own experience:

    Not cheese, Peanut Butter and Honey… It’s like crack cocaine to them, they can’t resist it. Trust me. 😉

    And, if you don’t want the mess a typical spring trap makes (SPLAT!!), there are different live-catchers. The only question there is … what do you do after you’ve trapped it? 😀

  25. A former lab tech suggested peanut butter and bacon as trap bait. He said it worked like a charm to catch escaped lab rats and that the more rancid the bacon was/became the more irresistible it was to the rodents. I’ve had very good results baiting traps this way.

  26. In an old apartment, there were pipes coming from the cellar into the first floor at an angle, with wide space around them. It was a mouse highway. Stuffed around the pipe to seal the opening with steel wool, your friend when blocking small spaces like that from mice. From outside they can get in through surprisingly small spaces under doors. In this building, one of the tenants trimmed off the bottom of the rear door so he could fit an extension cord under it. If there was anything like that, or anyone left doors to the building open, critters came in. To be fair, in 18 years here we’ve had mice three times and a rat once. The last mouse was a young lone ranger and was an immediate goner. Prior mice were families. The rat was especially skittish and brilliant. It took two rat size glue traps end to end in the entry he used from under the cabinets beside the stove. He got stuck in both and was so frenzied I thought he’d get free before I could get him and the attached traps into a bucket of water. Ended up bludgeoning him with the side of a hammer a couple times to put him out of his misery. The rat got in as a result of the people landlord had working on vacant apartment to completely rebuild it leaving the cellar open, and rats had become more of a plague in the area due to disruptive construction projects and weather. We weren’t alone. Mice are pretty bright, too, and cute. The first time we had them in this apartment, I tried a fancy trap where the mouse was supposed to be lured into a door and then be unable to get out. Mouse comes onto the counter, looks at the trap, then gives me a “you’ve GOT to be kidding” look. So snap traps and peanut butter it was.

  27. I do not enjoy when my dog catches a squirrel or rabbit in the yard; I should probably just let her have it, but we have convinced ourselves that if she doesn’t get “the taste of blood,” she won’t be constantly hunting. (She snags then and shakes them violently, but so far I think I’ve interrupted her before breaking the skin of any.) So I make her drop them – often barely alive – and then I have to kill them and chuck them over the fence into the wooded patch. My husband is not up to the task.

    Should I just let her have them?

    I don’t know what answer I’m hoping for here.

  28. Pingback:Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup - Pirate's Cove » Pirate's Cove

  29. Jamie, the dog will kill them by shaking them. The death by shaking is quite fast. Then you can reward the dog with a treat, put the dog inside, and throw the remains into the wooded patch where predators will consume the remains. The death by shaking is quite fast.

  30. I live in rural New Hampshire, and mice, flying squirrels, and other critters love to nest in my attic…of course, they make forays into the other parts of the house (kitchen and elsewhere) in search of food.
    I didn’t want to kill them unless necessary, so I used a trick that sailors use to prevent rodents from nesting in (and damaging) their sails over the winter–I bought a box of dryer sheets, opened it, and tossed it into the attic.
    Not a single critter since!
    If you don’t have an attic, try putting the dryer sheets in crawlspaces, your basement, or other, similar spots.

  31. Works with cars, too—if you park them outside for long periods of time in squirrel/mouse country. (I.e., if you don’t want them setting up shop in your engine block…or chowing down on your electrical wiring.)
    But then you’ll have to drive around with your car smelling like a laundromat… (Yes, life does have its challenges….)

  32. My cousin in Montana has several horses on her 14 acres. She keeps her horse barn populated with feral cats. The Humane Society has trouble giving away feral cats, so my cousin is doing the Humane Society by taking feral cats off its hands. The feral cats keep the barn clear of rats and mice.

    I asked my cousin if she expected the cats to feed themselves from critter captures. She replied that she feeds the cats. The cats will hunt whether they are hungry or not.

  33. I live in the country, and therefore live with mice constantly invading our home (Gd knows how they get in!) There are several traps that you can buy for under $20 that connect to a 5 gallon bucket. They have a ramp that leads to a drop-down plank with bait on it, so the mouse literally walks the plank and drops into the bucket. The key is to put about 3 inches of water in the bucket so the mouse drowns, otherwise it will jump out as you mentioned.
    I have read that death by drowning for the mice is inhumane, although having to spend three hours cleaning out your pantry after a mouse invasion is inhumane too.
    I have started calling them “hamice.”

  34. At my farm my dogs ate what they killed, no discussion about it (sans armadillos).

    Even my little Dachie would bring in a rabbit and guard it with her very existence against the other two.

    I recommend Joseph Carter the Mink Man on YouTube. He works a combo of dogs and minks to rid farms of rats. I love watching all of them work together.

  36. Mink? That kind of minks? You know the ones that we are not allowed to have anymore because they are so wonderful to wear?

    Note on feral cats: they breed almost as fast as mice and rats and become a problem also

    While visiting relatives in Arkansas the family went out on the lake on rubber rafts. They pulled up to land a few minutes so everyone could stretch out and two young gals we did not know who were about 13/15 (+/-) in pulled up at the same time. What did they have in those cloth bags we asked? “Oh we are out catching poisonous snakes. We turn them loose in our barn and it keeps the mice and rats down” Geez, I dunno, but I would rather have mice and rats than poisonous snakes sneaking around my barn! Just sayin

  37. Anne mentioned the poem “The Stolen Child” by Yeats.

    It’s an early poem Yeats wrote when he was concerned with Irish mythology, faeries and mysticism. In the poem the faeries lure a human child to join them:

    Loreena McKennitt did a marvelous treatment in song.
    _________________________________

    Come away, O human child!
    To the waters and the wild
    With a faery, hand in hand,
    For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

    –Loreena McKennit, “The Stolen Child” (1985)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izYzuG0Vh2k
    _________________________________

    It’s one of Yeats’ most striking, haunted poems. In McKennitt’s song one can hear the bloodhounds in the background searching for the child.

    I find myself ambivalent. It’s a horror that the faeries want to take the child away. Yet I wonder if the child might be better off.

    For the world’s more full of weeping than I can understand.

  38. My neighbor with a mouse problem had great luck with a plug-in electrical device (ordered from the Vermont Country Store catalog). It sends an electrical something-or-other (current???) through the wiring in the walls of the house. The mice take off immediately and it continues to repel them. No killing.
    Obviously you wouldn’t want to use it if you had pet gerbils, mice, Guinea pigs, etc. Cats and dogs are not affected.
    Neo, the cats I’ve known generally don’t bring you a dead mouse – they bring you HALF of a dead mouse. Which half depends on the cat…some prefer one end and some prefer the other….

  39. Ruth:

    Riddle:

    What’s twice as bad as a cat bringing you a dead mouse?

    A cat bringing you half of a dead mouse.

  40. One evening, I was carrying a laundry basket heaped full of laundry down the stairs to our apartment’s basement laundry room and I couldn’t see the stairs very well on account of the laundry piled high. There was a a washcloth on the stairs and I stepped on it.

    There was a mouse under the washcloth.

    In 40 years I have not forgotten the feeling of breaking bones under my stocking clad foot.

    I literally shrieked and hurled the basket down the stairs and turned and ran back to my apartment. When I got upstairs I was crying so hard I was incoherent and hubby thought I had been attacked. It took a while to calm down enough to get the story out.

    Hubby had to go retrieve the clothes, do the laundry himself that night and I made him throw the washcloth and mouse away too.

    I am not a cryer and not afraid of snakes, mice, spiders, etc, but the feeling of those bones crunching was just too much.

    He did say the mouse was well and truly dead and that it probably didn’t suffer. Don’t know if that’s true or he just told me that because I was so upset.

    But it bothers me to this day.

  41. Just remember: humans are the apex hunters on this planet [unless Snow On Pine’s UFO explorations turn out to be true?]

    And humans have learned how to jump 250,000 miles into space!!

  42. Just Lily:

    That’s quite an experience. If you’re unfamiliar with the Robert Burns poem I quoted in the post, I think you might like to read it. It’s a tiny bit similar.

  43. In the Yates poem I can see symbolism that reflects events of today.
    Perhaps the stolen child is one lured away by Fentanyl. Or, perhaps by false promises of a feminist leader, could also be political media. Could the brown mice scarring around the oatmeal be communist leaders grabbing the goodies for themselves?

  45. Sometimes, cats are useless. There was a baby mouse in my house in front of my fireplace. ALL three of my cats were watching in awe, but when the baby mouse would start to run towards them, they backed away in fear!! I caught the little mouse and brought it outside. It was too young to find it’s way back in, and probably died.

  46. Not so much useless as that they likely froze…in awe of life’s fathomless mysteries…
    (Cats’ll surprise you from time to time…)

  47. Just Lily: You might console yourself by the likelihood that if the mouse was just lying under that washcloth it may have been dead already.

  49. Long ago when our cat Toby (RIP) was young, he had been out all night. We had sort of inherited him from our old neighborhood, where we think he had once belonged to someone, but eventually became a stray, maybe when those people moved*, so willy-nilly, he was an indoor-outdoor cat.

    Well, we got up in the morning and Toby greeted us at the door, meowing with great verve. We let him in to feed him, but he kept trying to herd us outside – coming into the house, circling us, then heading back to the door. Eventually we caught on and followed him back outside.

    At the bottom of our porch steps, he showed us – with evident pride, and I don’t think I’m anthropomorphizing – a bird carcass. And then he performed the most amazing reenactment, leaping up and batting at the air repeatedly, then turning back to look at us expectantly.

    Not until we gave him effusive petting and attention and congratulations on being a mighty hunter would he go inside and have breakfast.

    * Lest you judge his previous owners (as we did), we almost got into the same situation with him on one of our moves: he took off as our furniture was being loaded up and did not return that night. We stuck around as long as we could, but eventually had to go to the hotel where we were staying for just the one night before moving, me by plane with two kids and, we hoped, the cat, my husband and the oldest driving, so the morning we were leaving we got up extra early and went back to the house to try to find him. Luckily he was waiting for us. He finished his life with us, but he was always his own cat.

  50. Mole snouts. Our first family cat, who hunted at night and waited at the back door to be let in in the morning (until the morning he wasn’t there–sad story), used to leave bloody mole snouts by the back door as proof of his prowess. There’s a Scots poem about that too–Albert D. Mackie’s “The Molecatcher”, which ends thusly:

    Sma’ black tramorts wi’ gruntles grey,
    Sma’ weak weemin’s han’s,
    Sma’ bead-een that wid touch ilk hert
    Binnae the mowdie-man’s.

    Or the mowdie-cat’s. Another line from the poem, which I remember but cannae verify, goes:

    Alang his pad (path) the mowdie-worps (mole corpses) like sma’ Assyrians lie…

    Good line.

  51. I am always amazed at how evolution works! Mankind discovered that they could make cheap, reusable mouse traps out of Homer buckets and within a few mouse generations mice evolved to be able to jump exactly one inch higher than the height of buckets!
    What a wondrous world we live in!

  52. A mouse can jump 13 inches. We can jump, on average, 13 inches. Most, not all, things can jump about the same height because they’re all effected by the same g force of the earth’s gravity. The difference is the ratio of the force generated by the entity’s legs to the mass of the entity.

  53. Used to live in the country in a house that had been empty a year, so yeah, we had mice. And we had a 20lb orange fluffy tomcat who was like a heat seeking missile to mice. Saw him, more than one time, move from one end of the house to the other in a blink to seize a mouse we hadn’t seen. But he never ate them… he’d play with them until they expired, then he’d bury them in the litter box and walk around singing songs of the valiant battle. Usually between 3 and 4am.

    We also had four cats from a rescued feral litter who were good mousers, but all they’d leave behind was the tail.

  54. Jerry, evolution does work in mysterious ways and places.
    Ever try to find something in Home Depot after they have rearranged things?
    Even apex predators have limits.
    It can be a jungle in there!!

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