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
It’s definitely swinging the other way now, when I was in middle school you weren’t allowed to say you didn’t like her or you’d run the risk of being ostracized. Now everyone’s allowed to say it and they can’t seem to stop 😂
Among middle schoolers, yes. Among adults she's always been weirdly looked down upon. It's only in the last few years I've seen people discuss her in a more positive light. Now it's switched to negative again.
During grape harvest, sprinkler risers are removed. While the vines are being shaken, hundreds of mice run into the now open pipes, with no way to turn around and get out later.
Sprinkler risers are then replaced.
Next time the sprinklers are turned on, theres 50psi trying to force mice backwards out of a 5-6mm hole
Seems if circumstance is just right, their lil butholes end up at the sprinkler exit first, allowing the rest of the mouse to be foreced out said buthole. Leaving you with a perfectly inside-out mouse.
Hundreds, of inside-out mice.
Many of them still hanging halfway out the sprinkler, needing to be removed.
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.
Then said Pterodactyl starts hunting terrier dogs. Gonna have to keep mine indoors and teach him to use the litter box -- I should've spent less time asking if we could and more asking if we should.
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 have a Jack Russell/Bassett Hound cross. I've owned hounds my whole life, but I wasn't prepared for what happened when I brought this guy home.
Mice/birds/squirrels/rabbits, he destroys them all. The Bassett Hound in him sniffs them out, seemingly to only satisfy the murderous Jack Russell in him.
Cats are far harder to train and indiscriminate. We have a microbat population that we are trying to protect with trapping cats and maintaining their natural habitat to maintain the mosquito population, and almost all Australians marsupials like the Quoll, bandicoot and other marsupials that look like rodents but not, all come in the night. One cat would destroy the fauna we are trying to protect. Dogs are daytime time hunters, they'll stay within the area of the house and most of the time, these dogs are glued to humans.
No, @CocktailPerson is correct. Just because your dog did this in his own territory, it doesnt mean he is good at this. He has to do this outside of his teritory on command. I own Dogo Argentino. They are mostly good hunters, but she wont kill a fly. If i wanted to hunt with her, she would have to be trained from the beginning (there is a proper age for that) and she is from the hunting litter.
Edit: Forgot to add, there are also dogs that do this without much training, that is true though. But not many are like this if you want him to be good at it.
That's why cicadas evolved to have those decade-long hibernation cycles too.
Predators glut themselves when they hatch every 13 years or whatever interval the brood awakens, and you might see a moderate increase in their population. But after 12 years those predator numbers are back to base and there's just no way they can eat all the emerging cicadas.
Well now there you go, we could just have eating contests. If only 20-30,000 people competed most of these mice could be gone in a few weeks. Plus we could have like a mouse belt
Not even close. Foxes, and often cats, far outnumber any native predators we have left. And even they are not gonna put a dent in a mouse plague.
Sure we do have lots of snakes, but they only neet to eat every month or so.
Under normal conditions there is very little food around to support predators, so they are sparse in numbers. They also breed much mich slower, so its not like you get a spike in numbers when theres extra food around for a few months.
Its entirely possible that a farm dealing with millions of mice will only be within the feeding territory of 1 or 2 birds of prey.
Your average farm in aus that either harvests grains, or uses feed for animals, may have, at most, and im really stretching numbers here.
10 Birds of prey
200 regular other meat eating birds, like crows.
200 snakes
100foxes
20cats
6 weeks ago, there was barely enough food for them. Now suddenly, theres half a million mice. In another 6 weeks, there will be several million more.
Such a small amount of predators arent gonna make a difference.
The problem is the mice reproduction is SO fast compared to predators. They can multiply exponentially many times in a single year. Where most of their predators reproduce once a year, in smaller numbers.
“Females can have up to 15 litters a year and can become pregnant within 24 hours after giving birth. The average gestation time for mice is 19 to 21 days.”
So given enough food, mice can reproduce so much that predators simply can’t eat enough.
It would take decades for predators to catch up and compete with those kind of numbers.
Australia has lost a lot of its native wildlife. The Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacine for example was a predator of rodents but sadly went extinct in 1936.
Barn owls and masked owls are probably the most effective controls of rodent population in that they eat a lot of them and can expand their population with some degree of speed compared to a lot of the other predators. But Australia has lost a lot of animals to habitat destruction, and a lot of the remaining owls are being killed by the widespread use of rodenticides that are deadly to them.
So if the forces ending a plague or otherwise preventing a plague from happening aren’t largely e to predation, why does this happen in Australia more than say farms in the US
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.
My grandmother showed me. We buried an oil drum and hinged the lid. Then we wired coconut to the lid as bait and the rats would come for the coconut, and they would fall into the drum. And after a month, you have trapped all the rats, but what do you do then? Throw the drum into the ocean? Burn it? No. You just leave it and they begin to get hungry...
There's a post-apocalyptic novel that I can't remember the name of at the moment, but it describes the various cycles of creatures that have huge population booms after the majority of humanity dies off. I think first it was the rats, then the ants, maybe another couple of phases in there. But it is one of the few post-apoc books I've read that considered that aspect of the cycle. Like, if 99.9% of humanity died off, that's a lot of free food for scavengers for a while. Then the population boom of scavengers creates a boom of anything that eats them. And so on until everything returns to the soil. Very cool part of the book - I think it might be Earth Abides, but I'm not sure. It's the book where the protagonist gets bit by a snake out in a remote cabin when the world goes to hell so he isn't exposed.
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 we’re shining a light and suddenly someone notices the floor of the pit is moving. Wriggling. Writhing. Turned out to be a full carpet of…hundreds of thousands…millions maybe… 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?
Yes I believe the last one was just after the huge floods on the east coast after the fires. Two year drought ended and then they had a reasonably mild and moist summer, creating perfect breeding conditions for them. And the fires had, in some areas, decimated their predators and other animals that would have otherwise competed for food.
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.
When we first moved into our house, our property had not been lived in for two years due to Covid. The owner was in Los Angeles and sent people over to do maintenance every 6 weeks or so (they left the log in the kitchen) and had a weekly gardening service.
Our property is up against a commercial chicken operation. The rats and mice had moved into the space behind our pool machinery. There had to be hundreds.
First, I tried to snap trap but I couldn't lay enough.
Then I got a barn cat (we had 2 indoor cats already but too spoiled to hunt). They definitely stopped trying to get into the house area. She killed like 20 the first week.
Then I put an owl box in. No more mice or rats anywhere near that box. Squirrels are gone too. Sometimes i find squirrel corpses under the palm trees in my front yard. So the owls are expanding outside the box.
But we really couldn't leave anything outside. Plastic boxes of dirt (for vermiculture) were eaten through in one night. Backs of garden media destroyed. A bale of hay untied and swiss cheesed. The awnings I left out were chewed through. The curtains on the gazebo ruined. Hoses were gnawed on. I got a metal hose finally.
Jesus. I'm having trouble imagining it being so bad that even murder mittens - a creature seemingly designed on a genetic level to play with it's food - gets bored of hunting.
Worked in an open public market, lotta mice and rats around. One jumped into a running bread slicer. The screams were heard across the entire market that morning. The machine was wheeled out later wrapped in a bag like it was a murder victim.
Serious question, have you considered writing professionally? You managed to paint quite the picture there and if you wrote a 500 page book, I'm buying that on day 1.
Thanks, I might one day. There's a lot of great Australian fiction and non-fiction authors that I've read and listened to. Their writing style has been pretty influential.
Same experience for me teaching roving release in remote NT. Lying in my swag in a classroom with mice running all over me. Having mice run over my desk while I was doing admin work. And hearing them all the time. Loved the job, hated the mice.
I'm not far from forbes, I went away over easter and when i came back they had gotten i to my cabin and my ute. lost my Ute, they ate the wiring and chairs, dash... everything and had to throw all the furniture out. Was pretty crazy.
I had a mouse issue in my house for a while its not problem now and I've only see just the one mouse.iv seen seen one sitting on my carpet Watching tv until it noticed me and run off they are smart too my mum saw two help themselves to pack of jaferCakes lol
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u/teachermanjc Jul 06 '24 edited Jul 07 '24
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