Has something unexplained ever happened to you? I don't mean UFO abduction type events. I mean little things. Small mysteries. I'll start us off with something that happened last month.
I'd been setting mouse traps in my basement and was getting like one a day or every other day for about a week. I was setting two traps on a shelf where we keep our home-canned stuff. One day I go to check the traps; one of them is not sprung, the other is gone. I looked around on the floor and there I find a dead mouse. He was crushed as if he had been killed by a trap, but the trap was nowhere to be found. I looked for that trap for about ten minutes. Then came back later and looked again. It is gone. I mean it is not in the basement. I can imagine the mouse getting hit by the trap and knocking it off the shelf and even falling out of it if it took a really weird bounce, but where did the trap go?
You are assuming the dead mouse was probably killed by the trap. The mouse might have been killed by a somewhat larger animal, such as a rat, which then went for the bait on the mouse trap and got caught, but it wasn't enough to kill him. Instead, he it got it on his front leg, and he dragged the mouse trap out of there, hurt but still alive.
I thought that a larger animal would be able to drag the trap off. But the dead mouse was crushed just like a trap would crush it. It wasn't bitten and bloody.
It's a real phenomenon, not often seen and almost never captured on video. But here's one such video-perhaps the only one in the world. And this, with an important variation, is what happened in your basement.
On this video, the first 4½ minutes are just the guy complaining about how the mice manage to get the bait without getting caught, so go to the 4 minute 30 second mark.
Okay, that video shows how two rodents can be caught simultaneously, but now here's the variation-instead of two mice coming up to nibble at the bait, a mouse and a somewhat larger animal, like a rat, came up to the bait at the same time. The trap killed the mouse, but the larger creature was too big to be killed by the mousetrap. However, the larger animal did get quite a whack on the noggin. With a great deal of squealing and effort over time, that larger animal was able to get his leg under the spring-loaded metal piece still holding his head to the wooden base and lift it enough to release his head, but in so doing he entrapped his foot under the spring-loaded metal piece. In the larger animal's prolonged effort to get his head free, the dead mouse was knocked out of the trap entirely when the metal piece was lifted enough to release the larger animal's head, and the mouse fell to the floor.
The larger animal, his head finally free of the trap, now didn't have the strength to get his foot out of it, so he limped off carrying the trap with him until he either thought of something to get his foot out or got devoured by a predator outside who took advantage of this foot being caught.
So the score is: One dead mouse, one missing larger animal who probably won't be back, and one missing mousetrap.
It's not impossible, I'll give you that. I haven't seen any evidence of rats, but they are smart and determined so they could get in.
Another theory I had was that the mice realized that without traps, I wouldn't be able to kill anymore of them so they worked together and took it.
OK, here's another unexplained event(s). Last week I found a plastic bag containing 10 hardboiled eggs in my front yard. Doesn't sound too weird, right? A couple of years ago I found a plastic bag with 5 hardboiled eggs in about the same spot. Before that, a whole venison bologna, the year before that, two large unopened bags of Doritos, before that a tray of iced cinnamon rolls, a bag of frozen shrimp and a large whole frozen fish. There were other items over the years but I didn't start keeping a list until 2011 and by then I had forgotten some of them. All of these items were in approximately the same part of my front yard. I live in a rural area and my road doesn't get much traffic. I have had numerous theories over the years but I won't go into them lest you declare me a madman. Any thoughts?
The other end may be in a picnic cooler belonging to a nice family in Iowa. They tell their friends that sometimes they put stuff into the cooler and it disappears. How awesome if they read this thread and finally discover where all their missing food had gone.
The other end may be in a picnic cooler belonging to a nice family in Iowa. They tell their friends that sometimes they put stuff into the cooler and it disappears. How awesome if they read this thread and finally discover where all their missing food had gone.
Maybe it's a squirrel with a gluttonous mind but too lazy to bury its find so it only completes half the job leaving it in your yard.
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace