Mice in shelters
What time of year do the mice usually stop fiddling around in the shelters? Ever?
3 minutes. Impressive!Originally Posted by warraghiyagey
???
Mice move on when people stop feeding them and they must begin to work a little harder at finding food. Shelters would be a better place to sleep were people to refrain from eating there, but I'm not hopeful they will stop anytime soon.
Mice are at shelters all year. The warmer months they will make their presence known. During the cold months, they will retreat under the platforms, nest in the rafters, or burrow around the shelter.
''Tennessee Viking'
Mountains to Sea Trail Hiker & Maintainer
Former TEHCC (AT) Maintainer
The only time that they are completely inactive is on February 29th......except every fourth year.
They will stop fiddling only if you break all their strings and they run out of cat gut. If you break their bows they will still finger pick.
(What do you expect from a moron?)
I'm not really a hiker, I just play one on White Blaze.
I really don't mind the fiddling, but when they start to sing . . . oh my!
Rainman
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
- Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass; Song of the Open Road.
I don't mind the fiddle playing. It's when they get the brass section...
CLICK
For a couple of bucks, get a weird haircut and waste your life away Bryan Adams....
Hammock hangs are where you go into the woods to meet men you've only known on the internet so you can sit around a campfire to swap sewing tips and recipes. - sargevining on HF
Overmountain Shelter. 10 Degrees one winter night! Mice still running around. I will never stay in a shelter again because of mice. They give me the creeps just hearing them scampering around.
No such thing as mice in shelters. Just a rumor started by cranky old men.
up over the hills, theres nothing to fear
theres a pub across the way with whisky and beer
its a lengthy journey on the way up to the top
but it ain't so bad if you have a great big bottle o'scotch
Don't start tenting until you have one of them run across your face in the middle of the night. Better yet, stay at a shelter with a resident wood rat who likes to nibble on the salt in a sleeping hiker's hair (Manassas Gap Shelter, 2001)!
GA←↕→ME: 1973 to 2014
Seeing as this is in the Greater Smoky Mountain National Park forum I'm gonna assume the OP wants info specific to the AT there.
Did the north half of the Smokies in mid-January about 5 years ago. Mice were active in Pecks Corner, Tri-Corner and Cosby Knob shelters despite night time temps in the teens or single digits.
Short version: they appear to be active through the winter.
Me no care, me here free beer. Tap keg, please?
I stayed at the Ed Garvey shelter in Maryland August 13.Did not see any mice.Another section hiker told me the mice were only bad in the south.Don't know if that's true or not because I had never been on the AT this far north and on my southern trips were never in winter.
They are there all the time. They are just much much more active during the summer months as well as the thru-hiker season
When it gets to be about 10 below in the Smokies the mice get really bold and desperate. "Back in the day" when the mice and I were always alone in the backcountry shelters in the winter, it would get like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. When they are at the point of either perishing from the cold, or eating you or your food they become quite fearless. They will surround you like a crowd of angry Lilliputians and try to drag you to the floor......
LOL! I have had one eat the other end of a Snicker bar which I had lodged against my nose (forgot to hang it) for safe keeping. Last month, in Laurel Gap shelter, one kept tickling my nose and I kept swatting at it. What was going on was I had a camper's roll of TP right by my face and they were robbing the paper for nesting material...
You just made half the posters of WB faint dead away.
My wife is so desensitized, she didn't understand the "why" of your post when I repeated it to her...
The house mouse evolved to live with humans. Mice live in shelters because people live in shelters.
Panzer
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