Mouse trapped

It's mid-November, and by now it's safe to assume that you have gotten to know your roommates or suitemates pretty well. Some students, however, are just becoming acquainted with several unexpected new roommates … mice.

"It was pretty recently, not at the beginning of the year … maybe three weeks ago?" Leslie Lagomasino, A&S '09, says, turning to her roommate, Cristina Hancock, also A&S '09, for confirmation on when they saw the first mice appear in their Edmond's room. Lagomasino and Hancock, like many other students living in the older Boston College residence halls of Edmond's and Walsh, have seen mice scurry across their floor. "[The mice problem] is legendary," says Lagomasino.

It's true: Encounters between mice and BC students, both on- and off-campus, have been the stuff of rumors and legends for years. But how much of what students hear is true, and how much of the problem are students not hearing about?

One notion that students have become accustomed to is the notion that if you live on the first floor of Edmond's or Walsh, you are in for some mouse-related problems, but on the upper floors you are home free.

Lagomasino and Hancock, however, live on the ninth floor of Edmonds, the top floor of the building. "People hear about it, but you don't think they're going to come to the ninth floor," says Hancock. Clearly, however, mice have found ways to navigate between levels in Edmond's.

This is true in Walsh as well. Dan Valladares, CSOM '10, and Ryan McGrath, A&S '10, lived on the fifth floor of Walsh last year. "We heard that the first floor was really infested with mice," McGrath says. "But I thought since we were on the fifth floor we would be OK." Unfortunately, they too encountered mice in one of their two four-man rooms a few months into fall semester.

"Late at night I would be sitting at my computer doing homework and I would hear this gnawing sound, and it would just keep gnawing until I threw something at and it would stop for a few minutes," says McGrath as he recounts his experiences with mice last year. "Then after a few minutes of no noise or anything it would start up again."

Valladares fondly recalls one Saturday when his roommates told him there was a mouse in the common room. At first, he thought they were kidding, but as soon as he walked into the room his mind was changed. "I saw this little mouse dart across the room, and I kind of jumped. But it was a fun afternoon trying to catch it," he says.

Given the above examples, it is obvious that mice have found their way into Edmond's and Walsh, but are these buildings crawling with mice? The answer is no. "There's a mouse problem? Wow, I'm going to have to keep an eye out for that now ... I've lived in Edmond's for two years and haven't seen any evidence of mice," says Andrew Klish, A&S '10, when asked if he had ever had any problems.

Furthermore, when they do occur, mouse sightings are usually nothing more than a glimpse of a shadow or a tiny mouse streaking across the room. According to Lagomasino, the mouse she saw was small. "It was a tiny mouse, it wasn't like a rat. If it was a rat, I wouldn't still be here!"

Molly Martins, CSON '10, who lived in Walsh last year and had mice in her room, says that she and her roommates "only saw the mouse twice."

With this said, how big is the mouse problem exactly? It is obvious that depending on who you talk to, a different sense of the magnitude of the problem will emerge, something that Henry Humphreys, director of the Office of Residential Life, would agree with. "I would like to know what student perception is, because there is definitely a different perception from the facilities staff," says Humphreys. "I looked back at the records for last year of any reports of mice, rodents, or insects, and for the entire year there were only 40 reported cases."

It is possible, however, that the number of reported cases does not reflect the actual number of rooms that have had mice. McGrath and Valladares never reported their mouse appearance to ResLife and chose to deal with it themselves. "We lived right next to the cardio room, and there was a big hole in the wall there, so we think that's where the mice were coming from," says Valladares. "So we would put a trash can or something over it to try and block them."

Nonetheless, odds are that the 40 reported cases are a fairly accurate depiction of the number of cases of mice, since ResLife encourages students to report problems and the process for reporting mice or insects in a dorm room is very simple.

"Students don't even need to call us, and they don't even need to call the work order center," says Humphreys. "They can just go online and register the complaint. The University has its own exterminator, so everything can be responded to immediately."

In addition to responding to mouse problems, the exterminator also inspects the buildings regularly to make sure they meet all regulations.

Humphreys also shed some light on why students don't typically start noticing mice until a few months into the school year: "The thing we tend to see over in Edmond's and Walsh is field mice. The minute the weather starts to change, mice will look for any opening into a building, including if a student props open a door, they will just run right in. In the Northeast, the minute there's a cold snap, every university is going to face that issue."

In fact, the only three reports of mice that ResLife has received so far this semester occurred when the temperature first sustained a significant drop.

Of course, you don't have to live in Edmond's or Walsh to discover mice in your room. Many students living off campus face the issue as well. Jessica Hough, A&S '10, is living with five other BC girls in a Cleveland Circle apartment this year, and they noticed mice the first weekend after classes began in September. With mice being seen this early on, before the weather got cold, it was more likely that the problem was not so much a migration of field mice as it was an issue of mice taking up a more permanent residence, and Hough's mice stories seem to reflect this assumption. "There were five mice we had to kill before we stopped seeing them," she says. "I was very concerned with sanitary issues because we found droppings throughout the house and I even saw them climb around my backpack, my boots, my clothes … it was disgusting."