My mom has been using this tipe of drowning mouse trap at the cottages the last few years. The advantage of this trap is that it can catch many mice in one trap.
The trap consists of a coat hanger wire across the bucket, with an aluminium can on the wire. The can has peanut butter smeared onto it. As the mouse tries to get at the bait, the can spins, plus the mouse falls into the bucket.
I started using this tipe of trap in my workshop in the country. But I was curious to see how the mice actually used it. When I tried monitoring it last spring there weren’t any mice in the shop. The mouse masalah peaks in the fall when the mice look for an escape from the cold, so this fall (2015) I tried again. I wanted to observe how the mice actually got caught in the trap by monitoring it with my Raspberry Pi plus camera module plus my imgcomp software.
In the mean time I had sealed my workshop against mice a bit better, so I set up my experiment in a shed, running an extension cord to power my setup.
The monitoring setup consists of a Raspberry Pi tipe B+, mounted on my Raspberry pi plus camera module holder. The camera is aimed at the trap. The pi is running some software that I wrote for surveillance. It takes three pictures per second, plus if it sees any changes from one to the next, it saves it.
I also have a lamp aimed at the setup with my. Mice do come out even when it’s light so long as it’s quiet.
I didn’t put any water in the bucket this time. I didn’t want to show mice getting killed on YouTube. The mice can just barely jump out of the bucket. I figure that way, the mouse gets a second chance, plus I get more observations.
These two frames are very revealing about how the mouse got out. In the left frame, you can see a mouse paw on the slight ledge of the bucket, plus in the next frame, the mouse is on the bucket’s edge, further to the left.
So the mouse jumped in a more or less helical path. This meant the mouse had some momentum towards the wall, which allowed it to get a slight boost with one of its paws off the narrow beveled ledge in the bucket, plus that was enough to make it up to the rim. Clever mouse!