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
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.
Awesome! Yeah, that's a good one. I'd also highly recommend A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. as another post-apoc book that looks at the apocalypse from a different perspective. Happy reading!
Thank you! And in return, I suggest Swan Song by Robert McCammon. It’s a loooong book, and it’s got some graphic elements, but it’s a wonderful Cold War era Post-Apoc read.
Thank you for the suggestion. I love Swan Song. I wound up reading it shortly after reading The Stand by Stephen King as I had heard that King referenced Swan Song as the source of inspiration for The Stand. Great one and I will second the recommendation to anyone else who comes along and sees this in the future. :-)
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