Keeping all the food completely contained is a good start. Put out some traps and maybe figure out a way to have the cilantro in a hanging planter.

Peppermint oil is a natural mouse repellant. Just put a few drops where you think they're coming in and by areas that seem to have activity. They probably went after the cilantro because you did a good job of covering up the other food sources for them. If you have kids or pets I would definitely recommend trying this method first as it is a natural, nontoxic deterrent - not to mention the nice smell! Hope this helps :)

I would use a natural repellant, as wistfuldreamer mentions above...and make sure there is nothing for them to munch on, like your cilantro. However once it begins to get cold, you might have them again trying to keep warm. I would try to figure out where they're coming in from -- and block off that entrance.
Live traps also work.

Look around the edges of your walls (inside and outside) for openings and stuff them with steel wool. This is the first step the management of my old building took, and it worked like a charm.

If that doesn't give you results, I'd suggest contacting a professional. If mice can get in, rats can get in, and smelling mousey food and waste can attract rats. Rats can cause a lot of damage inside your walls because they will chew through anything, and don't forget that they can also poop and die in there. Yuck.

In the same vein, if you ever find animals nesting near your home (rabbits under a deck, ducks in the bushes next to an outside wall), you should have the nest removed. The smell of the animals, their food, and their waste attracts rats, and animals that dig will have already made tunnels that give the rats a head start toward chewing their way in.

We "Borrowed" Cat hair from a neighbor once and put it in the places we knew the mice were using as entrances and hallways. The second apartment we found mice in allowed pets so we adopted a kitty of our own. Little prey food are very conscious of predators or even signs of predators and are likely to stay away so long as they see it or smell it.

Hey, Ryan (the questioner) here! Unfortunately, these are super-smart hyper-evolved fat NYC mice (not rats, we've spotted them and can confirm) and they have figured out how to shape the steel wool that I stuffed into their entry point into an igloo entrance. Also, the corner they're coming from is behind/under a radiator and a mess of heat/water pipes, which makes it super difficult to block off and trap around. I'm definitely going to try the peppermint oil trick. Anyone have luck with sticky traps? I know they're not humane, but I don't have any qualms with thinning the mouse over-population in my neighborhood.

We get the occasional mouse in our garage (where we keep our pantry). But we have a very large cat, and after about two months of her catching (and not killing, she just tosses them around) the little buggers, they stopped showing up. I dont know if just pet hair would work. The previous tenants had dogs and there was hair everywhere. My mom has used ammonia soaked cotton balls to keep critters away, but she doesnt have pets or kids to think of.

My ex-husband and I used the sticky traps once and I will never do that again. It's one thing to wish death on mice but it's a whole other thing to actually have to kill it yourself. I would say the spring traps are more humane, if you consider killing mice humane. At least they die quickly with the spring traps, but obviously if you have small kids spring traps are not good to have lying around.

Sticky traps are horrible--stick with the spring traps. Bait them with peanut butter and slide them behind/under the radiator and wherever else they may be coming in. Keep baiting and re-setting them until you're not catching any more mice.

It is much, much easier to dispose of a dead mouse from a spring trap than it is to dispose of a live mouse struggling to get free of a glue pad.

Ugh I agree with the last two posters. My maintenance guy put out sticky traps in my kitchen and it was the most disturbing thing to come home to. I cringe a little now, months later, thinking about how horrible it was. I'd say give the peppermint a try and if that doesn't work go with the spring traps- as everyone else has pretty much said too.

Sticky traps are cruel. My boyfriend had a mouse problem and bought sticky traps that supposedly had poison in them. They did not kill the mouse, so we had to drown it. Not fun. Then his dog caught one a few days later, but he had no idea what to do, so he just held it softly in his mouth with a proud yet confused look on his face until we could get him to drop it. We had to drown that one too.

Moral of the story- go with spring traps.

we've had some success on our rat problem with some sort of peppermint-based pellets in a shaker (big blue canister, havahart brand, i think).
we haven't been able to keep them out (just too many holes in our old house), but we sort of accidentally trapped a rat into a small space by sprinkling that around it. it was still there 24 hours later (our dogs finished that job...gross but effective).

to add to the reasons above for not using glue traps, *mouse* sized glue traps will not stop a *rat*. if you don't know which you have, that can result in a glue trap drug about and spilled all over your kitchen (ugh).

We had somehting similar down here in Texas. They were big mice (or maybe everything's just bigger in Texas) and smart too. We tried everything to get rid of them. Kill traps, live traps, sticky traps, oils, repellents, CO2 powered hand guns, our dog would even stay up all night and listen/hunt for them but we still had mice. We had to re insulate and sheetrock walls because of them. Finally after I think 2 years my dad gave up and tossed poison in the attic. A week later, no mice. The whole process was really inhumane, but they've found your home to be a warm place out of the elements and they're not going to just leave.

1. find the holes and stop them up with steel wool.
2. d-CON
3. Wooden mouse trap. Use a tiny blob of peanut butter. Slide the baited trap inside a paper bag. The paper bags used for wine bottles are perfect but any size will do. When the mouse springs the trap, fold the top over on the bag and throw the whole mess away.
4. Buy some more traps.

The mouse in the picture is really cute...

When I lived near the beach, we had constant problems with mice and rats. Then I found the Rat Zapper. It's a little pricy, but it's clean & quick. Here's a link: http://www.ratzapper.com/ Good luck!

Sticky traps are awful BUT spring traps can be even worse.

If a spring trap catches a limb instead of the neck, the mice don't instantly die -- they're stuck in the trap alive with a badly broken limb. Listening to a mouse cry because it's stuck is terrible, but listening to it cry because it's stuck and horribly injured ... ugh, it's really sad.

Also, while I'm obviously affected by the inhumane treatment of any animal, mice can spread a variety of diseases and attract rats. Do NOT act slowly on this problem. If your precautions and traps aren't working, you should really call an exterminator. Don't risk your health by taking your time.

You have to take care of a mice invasion, it won't go away on its own. Even if you're not going to use an exterminator, they can be helpful in just doing a tour of your home, identifying points of entry to cover up (not just with steel wool either, something more permanent) and advising you on the best locations to lay the traps.

Keep all food in containers. For your trash can, get one that tightly seals, I like the stainless ones by simple human. No flippy top trash cans. I also put away my toaster in a cabinet where there's no entry points. Even though I was good about wiping it down and dumping the crumbs off the tray, there will still be an errant crumb here and there and the mice will find it especially if you've blocked off their other sources of food. Gross but true...

You have to take care of a mice invasion, it won't go away on its own. Even if you're not going to use an exterminator, they can be helpful in just doing a tour of your home, identifying points of entry to cover up (not just with steel wool either, something more permanent) and advising you on the best locations to lay the traps.

Keep all food in containers. For your trash can, get one that tightly seals, I like the stainless ones by simple human. No flippy top trash cans. I also put away my toaster in a cabinet where there's no entry points. Even though I was good about wiping it down and dumping the crumbs off the tray, there will still be an errant crumb here and there and the mice will find it especially if you've blocked off their other sources of food. Gross but true...

cats cats cats cats cats cats cats.

We have cats and still had a mouse problem! Bounce sheets are supposed to repel the occasional mouse entryway.

But we had multiple entry points and used the Rat Zapper as a trap (from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Agri-Zap-RZCOO1-Zapper-Classic/dp/B002665ZTC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1313712886&sr=8-2)

I found it to be far better than any other trap since the mice die immediately (no suffering) and there is very little clean up required. It also works every time.

It is a little more expensive than other traps, but you can use it over and over again. Maybe you could split the cost with your neighbor!

My mother has been using peppermint oil with success. She soaks cotton balls and places them around the house in corners, and also made a spray with the peppermint oil and water to spray around outside. So far it's working (and she had quite a few mice), and a bonus? Her house smells amazing!

D-CON makes a "pellet" dish, filled with green pellets. It works two ways. First, they bring it back to their nest and it's a poison, so it will kill them. Second, you can find where they are hiding in your house by where you find pellets that they are hiding away. Good luck!

I second the fact that NYC mice have learned to survive a lot, they're almost up there with the cockroaches on a survival-ability scale. We're moving on to spring traps.... Or maybe some sort of see-saw off the counter into a big tub they can't jump out of (something like this: http://journal.chrisglass.com/2005/09/how_to_catch_a_.html) - has anyone tried that?
We just found out that our mice have learned to ignore all the poison, including d-con pellets - we found a huge stash of untouched poison surrounded by droppings...it's like they're mocking us. And the older mice have learned to not walk on the glue traps (!), baby ones are not so street-smart but they're harder to have to "deal" with afterwards (they're cuter). Thankfully my husband handles that.
We tried using humane live traps and the mice are either too fat to get in or know better, they were never tripped.

CATS.

I agree with other posts - I've always had cats and never had to deal with mice or bugs. And cats are much cuddlier than traps or poison, too.

I have three cats. One outside and stays in the garage. We have two cats inside of the house all the time. In the last two days, we have caught 7 mice. They are coming from everywhere. We still have them in the basement, kitchen, and bathrooms. We can't catch them fast enough between mice trap and the cats. Our house is pretty big and I can't tell where they are coming in from. I am calling pest control to get help but can't imagine what happened. None of our neighbors are having this problem. I can actually here them chewing on the wall in between the cabinet and drywall. It’s like a scary movie and we have been overthrown by mice. Even the cats are confused by the number of mice.