Maggie's Farm

We have a chimney cap, we have a stainless steel liner running from the very top of our chimney, about 35' high, right down into the new woodstove in the kitchen. We have three cats.

Nonetheless, every summer, usually in August, we find mice, live mice, inside our woodstove. How do they get there? No idea. Do they run down the length of the chimney liner to sit in our stove and watch the cats through the glass? There's no other entrance to the stove; the door is closed tight in the summer. If they tried to run through the kitchen and enter the stove from outside (entering through a still-undiscovered hole in the stove), one of the cats would nab them. The mason who installed the chimney liner in 2015 can't figure out how they get in there either.

So, every August and September I put little humane mouse traps inside the woodstove, baited with peanut butter, and take the little guys way out into the woods to release them. It's become a late summer ritual around here. A mystery, too.