MOUSE: great white hunter sets out to bag the interloper

MY wife spotted it, a tiny flash of fur darting to a patch of peanut crumbs beneath the patio bird feeder in our back garden.

Then it rocketed across the flagstones into the bushes.

It was a mouse all right, but what kind ?

After learning of her observation, your correspondent - the Great White Hunter - immediately vowed to set out and catch the mouse.

But more about my scaled-down safari later.

In truth, there are probably dozens of mice and voles living secretly in our back gardens, feasting royally each day on the nuts and seeds we put out for birds.

If they have any sense, they normally restrict their suburban activities to pitch darkness when they are less likely to be spotted by someone half-heartedly gazing out at their neglected flower tubs, wondering what blooms to plant this year.

It must be hard living in a world where virtually every other creature wants to kill or eat you.

And yet mice, and their diminutive cousins voles and shrews, collectively enjoy a number of advantages to give them a fighting chance of survival. Speed and agility are two of the most obvious, as well as sharp hearing and a powerful sense of smell.

Yet even these are usually insufficient to deter a determined weasel intent on a kill or a cat prepared to sit for hours until a bite-sized snack emerges from its hole.

The beastie in our garden was unlikely to be a shrew, which prefers thicker cover and feeds mainly on worms and insects.

Nor from my wife's description was it a vole, which has a much blunter face and smaller ears than a mouse.

No, it seemed it was definitely a mouse that took a chance that day two weeks ago and ventured out before darkness had properly fallen.

So the safari began.

First of all, just as any seasoned huntsman would, I winkled out every last scrap of information from the only eyewitness available - my wife - as to the exact route the mouse had taken in his daring sortie across the flagstones.

Following this, I cunningly laid an old-fashioned, glass milk bottle on the route.

This was cleverly propped up on one side so that our mouse could get in at the peanuts provided but would then find it devilishly difficult to get out again owing to the slipperiness of the glass.

It's a well-known device used by we mouse hunters, you know.

Next day, no mouse.

Some peanuts gone.

Ah, it was obviously the angle of the bottle that was wrong.

It was insufficiently steep to imprison the mouse.

I corrected this.

Next day, no mouse. More peanuts gone.

Feeling slightly miffed at being outwitted thus far by a mouse, I painstakingly propped up the bottle at a sheer 90 degree angle using a circle of bricks.

Next day, still no mouse. All peanuts gone.

What was this, a damn Houdini mouse ?

"Have you caught that mouse yet ?," my wife asked. No!

What I needed was some professional kit so, on my way home from the office, I bought a top-of-the range, highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art mouse trap from a local hardware store. Cost: £2.50.

The beauty of this simple humane mouse trapper is that it's constructed of transparent plastic so you can look your mouse in its beady little eye after catching it.

Instructions to set the trap-door were duly read, fresh peanuts inserted, and the trap itself laid.

At about 11pm, a faint and unfamiliar scrabbling noise from the patio drew my attention away from Newsnight.

I grabbed a torch and shone it out of the patio window at the trap.

Ah-ha! There, struggling vainly against the device constructed by the finest minds of mouse trap science, was indeed a mouse.

But what kind of mouse ?

Closer inspection revealed it to be a wood mouse, about the most common mouse there is in this country.

Since it had given me such a runaround, I thought about knocking it on the head and selling its pelt to one of those ladies who lunch in Kensington. However, as its pelt would barely cover a single, perfectly manicured finger of one of those ladies, I let it go.

Naturally, I did give it a very stern talking to beforehand, just to let it know the type of guy it was messing with.