The Plague

 

When Australia does something we do it all the way, even Plagues!

Since the mid 1700's we have had several Mouse Plagues a century, I lived through one in the late 1970's. At the time my Mother had a house in the outback grain belt town of Kimba and I spend many weeks a year out there helping her keep the expansive yard and garden. When the Autumn mouse plague swept through the area I went especially to see it. The mice ate every plant in the yard and even stripped the bark from the trees, they ate anything made of paper or cotton, they even ate the plastic off house wiring causing many fires.

 

Of course everyone baited the mice but then the cats, birds and reptiles all ate the poisoned mice and they died to. Some dogs and even hawks and Eagles ate sick reptiles and birds and died a. Cats that killed but did not eat mice got so sick of killing that they would lay there bored, as mice ran right next to them...and how many mice were there?

 

If you lifted a sheet of roofing iron laying on the ground there would be several hundred mice under it. (and often a bloated snake unable to move from it's full belly)

My mother set up a 44 gallon drum with a beer bottle fixed hanging over the edge, the drum was partly filled with water to drown the mice that fell into the open top and the bottle was made slippery with fat or butter. I was quite sure it would catch exactly nothing….

The next morning it had two buckets full of dead mice in it, they were so desperate for food they ventured out on the bottle to lick the fat off, eventually they slipped off. In fact that drum had at least one bucket full of mice every morning until we tired of scooping the bodies out and carrying them away to the local tip. After nearly two weeks we removed the bottle and even then it had many dead mice every morning as they tried to get the water to drink, fell in and drowned. I ended up turning the drum over so I didn't have to clean it out every day.

That year there was no crop of any kind, no vegetables in the gardens, no flowers, nothing. This went on until the cold winter froze and starved them off in staggering numbers, the smell of a decaying mouse still makes me feel sick from the remembering.

The last mouse plague was 2011, it was bad in some places but we saw very little of it here, the government supplied farmers with thousands of tonnes of poisons in affected areas to stop the plague before it got too bad. I only killed a few hundred that invaded my shed…

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