When the cold comes, the mice and rats move indoors.

They leave those frozen burrows in the ground and seek warmer environments. Your home becomes your winter retreat. And as if paying the heating bill for them wasn’t enough, you also give them more food than they ever found outside.

Once they are comfortable, they start looking for groceries. Before long, they’re invading your cabinets, chewing on food containers and spilling the contents to scatter them all over your closet.

Not only do they leave you a mess to clean up, but they contaminate your food so you can’t eat it yourself.

It usually starts with a sound. As you sit down to watch TV, you hear the faint tapping of tiny feet as one of these furry pests runs across the linoleum on your kitchen floor. Or listen to the noise overhead as rodents run over the roof.

Then you start to catch the movement from the corner of your vision. You think you notice something running along a plinth. You look up, but at that moment whatever is hiding behind a piece of furniture and out of sight.

Soon those little business cards, rodent droppings, will appear along the walls around your house.

Mice and rats are creatures of habit. They mostly stay near a wall. They like to run around the baseboard where they find furniture and appliances to hide behind, or under, when they see you get too close.

As soon as you see these pests, or signs of them, in your home it’s time to start treating them before they get out of hand.

Rodents not only litter your home with their droppings, but they are also carriers of diseases that you don’t want to be exposed to.

Pest control techniques for rodent infestations come in different forms. You need to consider each method of treatment and decide which one is best for you.

The fastest treatment for mice and rats is poisonous baits. Place the bait in a strategic place where it attracts the rodent, but does not drive away the pest.

Baits work well, but they have a downside. After the rodent eats the bait, it crawls to die (usually to a spot inside the wall). About a day later, the corpse begins to smell. The smell turns into a stench as the body breaks down.

A rotting mouse usually stinks for no more than a week. A rat (due to its larger size) stinks two or more times as much.

Another method of rodent control is the proper placement of sticky boards.

Place the board next to the baseboard where you find evidence of rodent travel. The mouse or rat runs to the board and is trapped by the glue. For the best effect, bend the board in a tunnel. Rodents see it as a place to hide.

Adhesive boards usually work quite well. I once found one that caught a family of mice (a mother and three babies). I also found boards with mouse skin where the plague managed to break free.

Rat boards are much larger than mouse boards. During my pest control days, I got mixed results from trapping rats on sticky boards. I caught a few, but most of the time I found rat skin on the boards.

It seems that the rats are strong enough to break free of the glue.

Mechanical traps work well and you have a large number of options.

Some are catch and release that catch the rodent alive, and take it away from your home to free it. Some are single use that catch and kill the pest, and you throw the trap and all after it catches the first rodent.

I prefer the old spring bar type trap (when using a trap) due to its multi-use ability. Catch a rodent, get it out of the trap, and keep using the trap to catch more pests.

The method you use is a matter of personal choice. The important thing is to learn how to correctly place the treatment of your choice and quickly control the rodent invasion.

You can enjoy that little feet sound, but not when it comes from mice and rats.