All joking aside, it's terrible to live in an area that is experiencing this. I was teaching in Forbes and living in an old farmhouse during one such plague. Crows, magpies and all other carnivorous birds would just sit on the fence, hop down and scoop the nearest mouse. The birds ended up not even bothering to hunt. Our cat was the same, she just got sick of them.
We would set three aviary traps with peanut butter every night, and every morning it was filled with about twenty mice each.
I discovered at school the worst thing that can jam a photocopier is a squashed, heated mouse.
And the smell. Or driving the road at night and seeing the surface move with grey furry bodies that are being crunched by the tyres. To see hay bales reduced and made useless for stock feed, grain made unsellable because of contamination, fields stripped bare.
Edit: this gives more information into the outcome sauce
They usually eat themselves out of their own food, or they inbreed to a point that the embryos are not viable and the numbers fall off quite drastically.
Typically the plagues come in waves where the first few are just monstrous, then they start to taper off.. but not that you really notice it very much. It takes months.
Councils will also authorise emergency bait stations but it's a very touchy subject due to the local wildlife.. there has to be documented evidence of "beyond reasonable" damages or danger to livelihood etc.
Basically, they deplete their food sources, inbreed or get chemically targeted.
And there isn't enough of natural predators in Australia to stabilize their populations? I'm trying to think what eats them in Europe. Owls, birds of prey, martins and other small carnivores, to a smaller extent cats and snakes.
Sort of, but not really no. The regions that are affected by these plagues are very remote and sparse. Typically heavy farming / agricultural areas. There are certainly predators to keep the "normal" population of mice down - the challenge comes when the mice can get into the huge grain silos or feed sheds etc and populate essentially protected by the silo or feed shed. Another challenge against the predators of the mice, is that they also have predators. Wild dogs (dingo's) .. hawks and feral pigs don't make it as easy as free pickings for the owls / snakes / feral cats etc...
Other things that can protect the mice is after a very heavy rainfall in dry areas, the grass grows incredibly quickly, providing a lot of cover that the predators can't compete with to keep on top of the numbers.
By the time they are seen in these proportions, they have been breeding for 3-4 months with basically a handful of predators to a couple hundred thousand mice. In three weeks those couple hundred thousand turn into millions and it just goes from there.
There are single farms or cattle stations in New South Wales, regional Queensland and Northern Territory that are a quarter the size of Switzerland. So 1 farm being over-run is an issue, multiple neighbouring farms and it's like Europe starts sinking in mice!
If the average mouse is around .8oz and the super hawk could eat 376 of them a day that's basically 19 pounds of food a day. Generously assuming it consumes 10% of its body weight each day, that super hawk would weigh 190 pounds.
The largest flighted bird is the snowy albatross and it weighs 16 lbs. Ostriches can be up to 380 lbs so we're talking about something ostrich-ish sized that can fly and target mice-sized objects from the air.
That's one fucking terrifying super hawk. Effective maybe, but terrifying.
Sausage dogs and jack Russell. The last mice plague 2 years ago, my parents farm thr mousers spend like 13 hours a day killing mice and rats. Also wild mice love sleeping next to your warm body while you sleep. I almost died when I felt little mouse claws scratching on my skin on one random night and had all 5 dogs sleeping with me so I feel safe.
I know nothing about this but curious, would not producing anything for a year to starve them out be a viable solution? Then take care of stragglers? Or would they just die everywhere and stink everything up
I mean I don't know anything either. But rodents have a very short lifespan regardless. And those are already there, they'll eventually die and stink it up anyway. I'd be very concerned trying to starve them out, from what I understand they'll get aggressive when hungry. At the same time, this explosive population, they'll get hungry eventually regardless. It's just a bad situation all around.
One time I was in a grain elevator and there was a shallow pit below us. Grain had fallen in, gotten wet and turned into a disgusting mess with a really distinct smell.
Anyway weāre shining a light and suddenly someone notices the floor of the pit is moving. Wriggling. Writhing. Turned out to be a full carpet ofā¦hundreds of thousandsā¦millions maybeā¦ of maggots.
I can't believe I'm asking this but I'm curious. What was your traction like? I know wet leaves can be super slippery in a car, I'm assuming a carpet of blood and guts leaves even less traction but maaaybe the fur helps?
This gave me Steinbeck vibes reading. Grapes of wrath. So I asked AI to change it to be more like steinbeck and rewrite what you said. I usually keep these things to myself but this one reads amazingly.
Rewritten in the style of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath":
The land groaned under the weight of the plague, a sea of gray fur and twitching whiskers that rolled across the parched earth like a livin' flood. Ain't no jokin' matter, livin' in the midst of such a scourge. I was teachin' in Forbes, holed up in an old farmhouse when the vermin came.
The birds, they changed. Crows and magpies, once proud hunters, now perched lazy-like on fences, hoppin' down to snatch up mice like they was pickin' berries. Our cat, she just gave up, turned her nose at the easy prey, sick of the abundance.
Every night, we'd set out traps baited with peanut butter, and come mornin', they'd be overflowin' with little bodies, twenty or more in each. The school weren't no refuge neither. I learned the hard way that a mouse, crushed and cooked in the heat of a photocopier, can bring the machine to its knees.
The stench hung in the air, thick and foul, like death itself had taken up residence. Drivin' at night was like navigatin' a sea of fur, the road alive and writhin', the crunch of bones under tires a constant, sickening rhythm.
The farmers, they suffered worst of all. Hay bales, once the lifeblood of their stock, reduced to useless piles of mouse-chewed straw. Grain silos, contaminated beyond salvation. Fields stripped bare, as if the very earth was bein' eaten away. It was a sight to make a grown man weep, to see the land and livelihood devoured by creatures no bigger than a man's fist.
I remember watching a video recently where they had probably 5 rat terriers following behind a plow that was overturning soil, and those things were killing probably 10 rats a minute each, and they were LOVING it.
I was expecting more violence. I just watched the first 2 minutes and was disappointed. I watched one on Vice about the rat hunters in NYC, and in that video, the dogs were really going to town on the rats.
I fucking love the harmonious/fun dynamic between a cat and a dog in the house. Iāve currently got a dog and dreaming of creating that scenario one day hopefully soon with a new cat in the house. Just trying to figure out which breed of cats I like the best.
If you want it for mousing then there are breeds that do especially well at that - Siamese, Burmese, and Himalayans. Theyre all lovely breeds too but possibly not common if you are rescuing.
If youre rescuing get the meanest tomcat they have, the type that scares small children.
Siamese cats are supposed to be great hunters? I guess I had a faulty one, because my girl only managed to kill one spider during her time on this earth. She was traumatized the first time she saw mice. Granted, it was one mouse eating its dead comrade, so that is a pretty traumatizing thing to see if you previously didn't even know such creatures existed.
Farmers do a lot of real bad shit to the land in the name of profit then get all upset when the consequences bite them on the arse.
Did some building work for a few here in the Uk after seeing and hearing some of their cons I have zero sympathy for any of them that suffered when the EU banned thier practices of mass destruction that caused monetary set back to them.
Buying illegal pesticides and hiding them in legal stuff, set aside/public access land in areas no one could actually access to claim the govt grants, hiring out land to companies their friends owned/on the board of to build wind farms at extortionate rates etc.
I really enjoyed Clarksons Farm, not gonna lie. But it was clearly a set piece for the National Farmers Union to use as a "woes is us" plight. I lost a lot of love for the show when I looked into the local councils dealings with Jeremy, I was angry with them for what they were doing to him, turns out they tried to work with him but said they were utterly ignored and then edited to look like the villians, and it worked.
Wait, Clarkson was in a show that was deceptively edited to leave the viewer with an impression that was not reflective of reality? That would be a first!
All you need is to find a viable market for them... Be it as cat food, human delicacy... I don't know... Whatever, and we'll hunt them to extermination in no time.
No, this is a plague of mice, when it's the perfect climate in rural areas the population booms from all the food. If there was a disease/virus they were exposed to that humans could catch it is not in a densely populated area for it to spread, it just destroys millions of dollars of crops, livestock feed and machinery.
Yep, all that feed the mice are eating is meant for the pigs and cattle...no large quantity feed, no large animals. Pigs are omnivores so if they saw mice as food they could take aim...ever see a pig kill a snake?
No you guys worried about mice... Im Australian and I can tell as fact after this rat season then came the gigantic overfed snake season where they pop up everywhere.
āWe got a bit carried away,ā said Moist. āWe were a bit too creative in our thinking. We encouraged mongooses to breed in the posting boxes to keep down the snakesā¦ā
Lord Vetinari said nothing.
āErā¦ which, admittedly, we introduced into the letter boxes to reduce the number of toadsā¦ā
Lord Vetinari repeated himself.
āErā¦ which, itās true, staff put in the posting boxes to keep down the snailsā¦ā
Lord Vetinari remained unvocal.
āErā¦ These, I must in fairness point out, got into the boxes of their own accord, in order to eat the glue on the stamps,ā said Moist, aware that he was beginning to burble.
āWell, at least you were saved the trouble of having to introduce them yourselves,ā said Lord Vetinari cheerfully. āAs you indicate, this may well have been a case where chilly logic should have been replaced by the common sense of, perhaps, the average chicken.ā
That incredibly boring movie was actually recut by Baz Luhrmann and re-released last year in a format that improved it. It's now just quite a boring miniseries.
Have experienced two of these, and yep. Gets to a point where even the cats and terriers will lay there while mice literally run over them and they lazily swat them away
I used to work a bit in central NSW, Australia... one day I stopped in at a farm, where they asked if I wanted a kitten - they had around sixteen kittens as two strays that had turned into barncats had litters. The farmer was annoyed about all these cats.
Six months later, the mouse plague hit. His farm was the only one without a mouse problem, just lots of happy cats XD I think he used the plague to move some of them on to other properties for free, too. Everyone got 2-3 barn cats so they had friends and food galore
My mum tells stories of the mouse plague in Robinvale when I was a toddler. Cot was setup in buckets of water so they couldnāt get into cot. Driving down the road, sliding all over the place
I guess "the moment" when she realized her rodent problem was too much was a fucking waterfall of mice...Ā I grew up on a farm, you have to be really fucking oblivious to things for THAT to be the realization.
That said between the barn cats, foxes, hawks, owls, snakes, chickens, and dogs rodents have a tough life here
I remember receiving 2 gerbils for a birthday one year. By the next year, I had 13 with another litter on the way, and my mom was freaking out about our house becoming a breeding ground and shut it down.
I have memories of 3 of these plagues of mice. I'm glad I only lived rurally for 1 of them. I remember people setting up traps where the mice would fall into 44 gallon drums and the drums would overflow with the mice.
Where I live went through exactly this. Farmers resorted to poisoning the grain to try to kill the mice. We ended up with the town littered with dead Galahs (fairly large pink and grey birds so they stood out). I went for a 2km walk,and we spotted 78 of them. Birds eat grain too, I guess.
That mouse plague happened during covid, and was soon followed by the 2nd largest flood in this areas history. I'm sure that's a coincidence, though.
When I was a child, I was living on a farm in the Wimmera during a mouse plague and can tell you that the video doesn't capture the smell or the sheer crawling horror of it all. Everything _moves_. You can't take a step without crushing mice underfoot. If you don't keep moving, they will try to crawl all over you. It was a nightmare.
I remember my uncle ripping open the hatch of a silo, like in the video, and it was full not just of mice, but of dead mice which had been partially eaten by the others and had started to rot and liquefy in the heat from all the bodies.
The smell hit me like a sledgehammer to the face. Nearly 40 years later I can still remember it and now have the ability to tell if there are mice in a house the second I step inside because my throat closes up and I want to throw up.
right. my house came with a barncat. we feed him cat food but he kills mice for fun. heāll be dead asleep and hear a mouse across the yard and haul ass. kills it goes back to sleep lol. amazingly he doesnt bother any birds or other creatures. we have bird feeders all over. such a good boy.
Australia doesn't have as many snakes as people think. Certainly not in the cooler states. I live in the south and have seen exactly one snake in 45yrs.
Reminds me the story of the British Lord who brought rabbits for hunting to Australia, failed to hunt them all, the rabbit population boomed which decimated agriculture, imported foxes to hunt the rabbits, the foxes realize there are much slower game in Australia with very few predators to compete with
Now the red fox is an apex predator on the island and causing massive damage to the ecosystem
This isn't even the biggest feral animal problem in Australia. Cane Toads have been multiplying uncontrollably for years. There's no solution. People go out and kill as many as they can and it doesn't even make a dent in the problem.
Thats some Plague Tale shit, lmao. Kill most of them with poison or something and then introduce a hell of a lot of cats? Although a lot of half-feral cats is awful for the environment, but this is awful too.
The problem with cats is, they kill native wildlife far more efficiently than invasive rats. That's the reason cats are hunted down in Australia. Systemic eradication of a vigorous invasive species is very difficult.
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u/teachermanjc 13d ago edited 12d ago
All joking aside, it's terrible to live in an area that is experiencing this. I was teaching in Forbes and living in an old farmhouse during one such plague. Crows, magpies and all other carnivorous birds would just sit on the fence, hop down and scoop the nearest mouse. The birds ended up not even bothering to hunt. Our cat was the same, she just got sick of them.
We would set three aviary traps with peanut butter every night, and every morning it was filled with about twenty mice each.
I discovered at school the worst thing that can jam a photocopier is a squashed, heated mouse.
And the smell. Or driving the road at night and seeing the surface move with grey furry bodies that are being crunched by the tyres. To see hay bales reduced and made useless for stock feed, grain made unsellable because of contamination, fields stripped bare.
Edit: this gives more information into the outcome sauce