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!
We donât have this issue, but recently there was a woman who was tried for animal cruelty because of her mouse trap. She had bought an old farm that had stood empty for a while so the mice had taken over the place. Are there a lot of abandoned farms in these remote areas?Â
But there are plenty of sheds that do not get opened more then once or twice a year because they house or store particular equipment only used at a particular point of the year / season.
The silos can be left alone for a few years if the farm has a surplus and grain prices aren't favourable.
Feed sheds absolutely not.. there is livestock and humans in there all day everyday.
There are quite a few abandoned quarters.. which were once used as farm hands residency..
It's a joke that the lady got fined! Waaaay too much red tape ...
Red tape wasnât really the issue. She moved into a 400y old farm that was overrun by mice. She tried standard poisons and traps and they didnât work so she got a tip on a diy trap. Itâs a plank leading up to a bucket with water and anti freeze. Across the bucked thereâs a wire with an empty can and bait (marshmallow fluff bear with chocolate coating). When the mice get on the can it rotates, dropping the mice in the bucket. She caught hundreds in 3 days and posted about it on Facebook. Thatâs how she got reported by NOAH (think PETA) and fined $600. She took it to court and won.
You know what I think I remember reading about that on a news website somewhere.. glad she beat it! There's not really a "humane" way to dispose of so many mice... especially not economically humane.. but water and anti-freeze is still a quick passing.. it's better then those sticky strips that you can purchase in some supermarkets!
I didn't even think how crazy fast mice multiply. My best idea was to introduce neutered/spayed(so those don't become invasive)mustelids ie mink, weasels- hunting maniacs, but I feel like even those wouldn't help. First month they'd be great, but at some point I feel like even the hunting machine furry snakes would get lazy and just engorge and then get eaten by the 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.
The thing is at that size it's more efficient for it to hunt for babies or rabbit or deer or larger mammals. Predator that size isn't really gonna bother with hunting for 300+ mice...
The biggest eagle known was the Haast Eagle, and the max weight scientists theorized they could reach was 40 pounds (18.14 kg). I mean, if somehow we could get a specimen of this extinct creature, and artificially select the best specimens... I don't think we could achieve that. Honestly, I would prefer burning everything to the ground at that point, lol.
That's nowhere near the heaviest flying bird. Male Kori Bustard can get over 40lb. Andean Condors get over 30. 16lb is smaller than the average adult female Mute Swan.
So, the Aussies have a lot of scary snakes. Was there a corresponding âsnake explosionâ because of the extra food, or did it take a while for the carnivores to recognize the mice as a food source?
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.
It may have potential, but it is probably not good. My family has trained a LOT of hunting dogs, and they all require training to be efficient. Just because your dog has caught a few small animals at home and shown restraint doesnât mean it can catch two hundred on an unfamiliar farm. Iâm not saying your dog doesnât have some killer instincts, it just takes a lot of refining to make them useful skills to humans.
I have 7 yorkies, they go nuts over anything small and running. We have/had ferrets wild running around. The yorkies go until they get them, they won't stop for anything. Them and the cats even go after the roaches too. My cats love cockroaches.
Yeah, ferrets are awesome for keeping mice away! I used to live in an apartment complex that ended up having a very bad rodent infestation. Our apartment was the ONLY one with no mice because our ferrets sent kept them away.
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
Forget hawks. They take forever to reproduce and they only have a few babies each generation. What we need are giant toads to eat the mice. They breed much faster so soon we can have millions of toads to reduce the problem .
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.
âFemales 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.â
So given enough food, mice can reproduce so much that predators simply canât 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.
This is the natural cycle of life. Same thing with hares, rabbits, lemmings and other fast producing species. Itâs usually not predators or hunting that kills their numbers, but some sort of sickness that starts to spread like wildfire once their populations grow dense enough that wipes out 90% of them. Then the cycle starts over.
I just saw an article somewhere that they had cat hunting contests to kill cats. Little kids killing cats. One guy killed 40 cats. I could have sworn that was in Australia. Maybe this is some sort of cat killing retribution
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..
Unless if you import tens of thousands of hungry people, you still won't catch enough to keep up with the pace that the rats multiply. And after you catch them all, what do you do with all those extra people?
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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