When cold weather arrives, mice and rats move indoors.

They leave those frigid burrows in the ground and seek out 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 feel comfortable, they start looking for groceries. Before long, they’re invading your cabinets, chewing up food containers and spilling the contents to scatter them all over the closet.

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

It usually starts with a sound. As she sits watching TV, she hears the faint pattering of tiny feet as one of these furry pests runs across the linoleum on the kitchen floor. Or hear the noise overhead when rodents run over your roof.

Then you start picking up movement from the corner of your eye. You think you notice something running along a baseboard. You look up, but at that moment, whatever it is, it hides behind a piece of furniture and disappears from view.

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

Mice and rats are creatures of habit. They mostly stay near a wall. They like to run along 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 control.

Rodents not only litter your house with their droppings, they also carry diseases that you don’t want to expose yourself to.

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

The fastest treatment for mice and rats is poison baits. Place the bait in a strategic location where it will attract the rodent, but won’t scare off the pest.

Baits work well, but they have a drawback. After the rodent eats the bait, it crawls to its death (usually somewhere inside the wall). A day or so later, that corpse starts to smell bad. The smell turns into a stench as the body decomposes.

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

Another method of rodent control is the proper placement of adhesive plates.

Place the board next to the baseboard where you find evidence of rodent travel. The mouse or rat runs towards the board and gets caught by the glue. For best effect, fold the board into a tunnel. Rodents see it as a place to hide.

Sticky 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 hair where the pest managed to escape.

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

It seems that the rats are strong enough to free themselves from the glue.

Mechanical traps work well, and you have a plethora of options.

Some are catch-and-release traps that trap the rodent alive, and carry it away from your home to release it. Some are single use ones that catch and kill the pest, and you throw away 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 capability. Catch a rodent, remove it from the trap, and keep using it to catch more pests.

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

You may enjoy that sound of tiny feet, but not when it comes from mice and rats.