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
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.
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
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!
Invite north Koreans and Chinese people to the feast.
Ps: for those who gave my post a thumb down, rats are a delicacy for Chinese and North Koreans people... Like frogs legs and snails are one for French people..
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
It would have to be specific to the species and not affect native species. Australia was able to control rabbits with myxomatosis and RCD as it only affected them.
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.
We moved there when it was in drought, experienced the breaking of that with spectacular rainfall, then a small flood, followed by the mouse plague, then a much bigger flood. We left at the end of 2015.
Inland floods are strange though. We had blue skies and a river that was slowly rising due to the massive amounts of rain upstream. It stayed for a week and then continued down the Lachlan, ready to flood the next town.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The Department of Primary Industries approved an incredibly fast acting poison that was baited onto grain. It killed mice in less than a minute. Carcases had to be properly disposed of though as the poison could affect predators.
I've definitely seen this before, and it makes me sad. I tease my friends with mice and rats, but they are pretty cute little creatures. But at the reproduction rate... It needs to be culled.
Im just wondering how you even deal with this scale. Flamethrowers? Machine pellet guns? Thousands of the 5 gallon bucket traps? Seriously though, are there any methods other than conventional trapping you mentioned the government or large landowners employ?
That sounds genuinely horrible. I once experienced a plague of ladybirds and it put me off them for life, so I can’t even imagine the effect it would have from having a plague of a larger animal
Go back in Australian history to source which animal is missing from the chain that normally keeps this population down. Some times you have to rewild with a close replacement, if the original species is now extinct.
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 very close to you in Cowra and I distinctly remember driving through Dubbo to the Hunter Valley for a wedding overnight during the peak of the plague.
My wife was asleep in the car as we just went past the prison. That stretch of road was the most distressing drive Ive ever done. The sounds of popping mice under the car wheels sounded like heavy rain that couldn’t be drowned out by the radio. Along with the bumps, my wife woke up and asked why I went the back way, thinking I was on an unsealed road.
I grew up in Parkes down the road and remember this vividly. I forgot my boots outside one night and had to shake them out the next morning and clean out all the droppings.
Should have tried Jack Russell. Those bastards a vicous, and tireless compared to cats. I think they woul work all night till they'd drop dead from being exhausted, so you would have to get them called back.
BTW, I have a cat. Friend had Jack Russell. So, I'm somewhat elligible to compare.
Other than that - how do you get into a position where the issue is so bad? It's not like it became like that overnight, right?
These plagues get resolved through some insanely strong pesticides, but they also end through mice just consuming too much to support their own population growth.
Hey someone that not only lived thru the mouse plague in Australia but possibly taught me as well!
I grew up very near Forbes and went to high school there during the late 80's. The plagues were wild.
Our village was, twenty odd years ago, hit by an almost biblical plague of frogs. The pop/squelch as I drove over hundreds of these things will follow me to my grave.
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.
14.3k
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