Of Mice and Australia

The U.S. has been putting up with any number of natural and manmade plagues of late. Seventeen year cicadas? Trumpism?

But at least - so far - we've been spared being overrun by mice. Australia? Not so lucky. 

For the past six months or so, mischiefs of mice (and mischief is, indeed, the name for a rodent gang) have been making their way through Queensland, New South Wales and northern Victoria. The country's breadbasket, its wheat belt. And they're truly on a nightmarish tear. 

The stench hits you first, pungent, musty and rotting. Then you hear them: a sound like ocean waves, or pouring rain hitting concrete. And the occasional squeak.

The horror lurking in the darkness is a throng of thousands of mice swarming above, around and inside a storage bunker of wheat at the Fragar family’s farm seven hours west of Sydney, Australia. After a long and painful drought, the mice are ravaging the family’s first good harvest in years and endangering the next one, putting their business on the brink of ruin. (Source: NY Times)

The Fragar farm isn't alone. There are thousands of others like it out there.

Mice infestations of great magnitude are nothing new. They tend to happen once a decade. But this one's apparently a record-buster. The worst that anyone can remember.

And those mischiefs aren't just munching their way through whatever's sitting there in a grain silo (and leaving their droppings to contaminate whatever they leave behind): 

...they’ve bitten people in their beds, dropped out of air-conditioning units and gnawed through appliances. They’ve eaten the toes off chickens in their pens. They’ve been blamed as whole towns have lost phone reception and a house has burned down.

"Eaten the toes off chickens." Harsh!

But it's not just farms. Stores. Offices. Schools. Hospitals. Ain't no one and no thing exempt from the micely ravages. 

Sure, they're cute in cartoons, but I'm not a big fan of mice.

Growing up, our house bordered on woods, so, come late fall, some of them would make their way in. We'd find the telltale pellets, the bitten off buttons in the dresser drawers - for some reason, "our" field mice liked thread.

My parents would put out D-Con and/or mousetraps, and that would be that. What we didn't kill would be gone by spring. 

I've had mice a few times. Nothing major, but irritating nonetheless. D-Con just means dead mice in the walls, so I've gone the glue trap, the bait station, and the classic snapping mousetrap routes. Glue trap I abandoned after I actually caught one. Since it wasn't dead - just writhing around trying to unglue its tiny paws - I had to kill it. Never again! I converted/reverted to a mousetrap with peanut butter or the Tomcat "disposable" station with the green bait.

That plus plugging up any cracks - and believe me, old buildings have cracks by the baseboards, by the doors, etc. - with steel wool. And what I do believe are the real magic mouse-away potions: cut up chunks of Irish Spring soap and cotton balls infused with peppermint oil.

Last time I had mice - spotted on two occasions in my den a couple of winters back - I put out the Tomcats and the classic traps, but never caught a thing. Nor did I see any more mice. So I have to go with using a screwdriver to poke rolls of steel wool into any cracks I find, augmented with the Irish Spring and peppermint oil cure, doing the trick.

But there are mice and then there are MICE, and Australia's dealing with the latter. 

It's a pain for everyone whose area has been overrun, but it's a major economic loss for farmers. Billions of dollars worth of crops are at stake. This after several drought years when the ground was too dry to do any planting. So: major losses. Then the rains finally came, but that just meant a bumper crop for the mice to gorge on. It didn't help that more environmentally-friendly farming practices had taken hold which had the unfortunate side effect of making life easier for mice, and made it easier for them to, well, breed like rabbits. In fact, they have an even shorter gestational period, so they can churn out new batches of critters even more frequently. The result: a population explosion. Mice in the millions.

Some Australian optimists feel that, with their Southern Hemisphere winter nearing, the mice plague will slow down. But others aren't quite so sanguine, holding that, if enough mischiefs survive the winter, there'll be another boom next spring. Store owner Robert Brodin is one who isn't exactly in the Pollyanna camp. 

 “They used to say once they start eating each other, it’ll be over, but they’ve been eating each other since December, and it’s not stopping,” he said.

Eating each other, eh? 

Not enough to have ample waves of grain and the occasional chicken toe palate cleanser. They need to eat each other? Is it the protein they're after, or do they just get sick of each other's company?

Anyway, life has been hard on the Australian farmers. Working on a farm is tough enough without having to contend with mice. 

Jo Randall and her family:

...live in an old house, full of tiny cracks and holes for rodent intruders to slip through. Even in the morning cold, she has to open the windows to alleviate the odor.

Signs of mice are all around: Ms. Randall’s phone case has been chewed ragged at the edges, the family’s stereo system has been destroyed, and there are scores of tiny teeth marks in the handle of a pair of scissors on the counter.

She thought the last straw would be if the mice ever got into her bed. But when it actually happened — when she found droppings in her good sheets at 10:30 p.m. after an exhausting day — she just sighed, stripped the sheets and made the bed again.

“You’ve just got to resign to the fact that you’re not going to win the battle, you’re not going to get rid of them,” she said. “So you just do the best as you can and just wait for it to be over.”

Mice in the bed? I. Can. Not. Imagine.

Wonder if they sell Irish Spring in Australia. Sure sounds as if they could use some.