D.fire, fire, the plague of Covid-19 and an all-devouring plague of mice. Rural New South Wales has faced just about every biblical challenge nature has to offer in recent years, but now she is praying for another – an almighty flood to drown the mice in their burrows and clear the devastated land of the rodents . Or at least a very heavy rain shower.
It seems like everyone in the rural towns of northwestern NSW and southern Queensland has their own mouse war story. In posts online, they tell about waking up to mouse feces on their pillows or watching the ground move at night as hundreds of thousands of rodents flee from torch rays.
Lisa Gore from Toowoomba told Guardian Australia that her friend stripped the fabric off her armchair when it started to smell, only to find a nest of baby mice in the stuffing.
Karen Fox, a resident of Dubbo, walked out of the shower Friday morning and saw a mouse staring at her from the ceiling opening. There is nothing she can do, she says, because the stores are sold out.
In Gulargambone, north of Dubbo, Naav Singh arrives five hours early for work at the 5Star supermarket to clean up the uninvited visitors from pests.
Matilda Boseley
(@MatildaBoseley)Kaza from Dubbo says she has 14 traps at home, but that’s still not enough to curb the mouse infestation. She was going to buy more, but the store is all sold out. #mouse plague @BuienRadarNL pic.twitter.com/EawXoD5Zrg
“Sometimes we don’t want to go in in the morning. It stinks, they will die and it is impossible to find all the bodies … Some nights we catch more than 400 or 500, ”he says.
Before opening, Singh must empty the shop’s 17 traps, clean up the excrement, and throw away any products that attacked the mice.
“We have five or six bins filled every week with groceries that we throw away,” he says.
The family business has had to drastically reduce stock, put everything in thick containers, use empty fridges to store the rest. Nothing in the store is safe, mice even chew plastic soda bottles. “They ran around faster after that,” Singh jokes.
After years of drought, rural NSW and parts of Queensland enjoyed massive harvests due to the recent wet season. But this influx of new products and grains has led to an explosion in the mouse population. Locals say they started noticing the swarms in the north in October and that the wave of rodents has since spread south and grown to biblical proportions.
Singh estimates the plague has cost the company more than $ 30,000 so far, and he’s not sure how long they can continue.
‘It’s been going on for three months. It will be very difficult, we have lost so many customers, ”he says.
Locals say the plague has affected people’s daily lives to such an extent that the usual conversation starter has changed from a comment about the weather to comparing the number of mice they caught the night before.
Pip Goldsmith in Coonamble knew she would have to set traps in her house and fields when the mice started to descend, but had no idea she would have to do the same in her car too.
“I realized a packet of seed cakes had fallen from a grocery bag in the backseat… the mice had chewed through the box and ate every seed. There was nothing left, ”she says.
That night I set six traps and kept checking them. I think I caught nearly 20 mice before midnight. “
Goldsmith’s car alone now stands at more than 100, and she thinks the total in her house would be in the thousands.
“They stink, live or dead, sometimes you can’t escape the smell … it’s oppressive, but we’re resilient.”
The plague has led to a new form of ailing family ties, with children deployed as front line soldiers in rodent combat.
“I have a four and a five year old, we have a lot of fun designing our traps with buckets and wine bottles… they can catch and throw mice very quickly. It makes you proud and squeamish at the same time, ”says Goldsmith.
Gore in Queensland says her 12-year-old son has taken on the role of the house’s main anti-vermin soldier.
“He goes out at 6:00 pm and sets the traps, and then he comes in for about an hour and then he goes out to empty them and put them back down, and keeps doing that four or five times,” she says .
“The record is 183 per night… It’s just like his job at the moment. He is very proud of himself, ”she says.
Lucy Moss, the owner of the Mink and Me cafe in Coonamble, says she had to pay to have her refrigerator repaired seven times after the bodies of dead mice clogged the machine.
“The mice get to the bottom of the fan and have a great old time and then the fan turns on and they can’t get out,” she says.
This alone has cost her thousands.
Mice destroyed a barn full of hay on Moss’s farm she was saving in case of another drought.
‘They pull in the hay and urinate and everything. It is then a health hazard to feed the cows and sheep, so we destroyed it, ”she says. “That was our safety net.”
Hay can cost farmers $ 500 per bale to buy in a drought, and Coonamble mayor Al Karanouh says farmers in his county alone have lost $ 40 million on it.
“Some farmers have lost as many as 2,500 bales … There is not enough money for the municipality to do anything to help. All we can do is try to prevent them from entering our offices, our machines, our tractors, our trucks. They eat all the wiring, ”he says.
Karanouh and dozens of other mayors have called on the state government to declare the mouse problem an official scourge and help provide additional bait, but so far they were unwilling.
‘I can’t understand why [they won’t declare it]It’s worse than the mouse plague of 1984, ”says Karanouh.
“I don’t think they want to do it because they will have to make a lot of money.”
Guardian Australia understands that the NSW government has begun to model how effective financial aid to farmers would be, but no decision has been made.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Agriculture Secretary, Adam Marshall, said that “ both the Department of Primary Industries and Local Land Services are providing information and assistance to landowners on how to control mice on farms, ” but indicates that commercial mouse baits are already exists. readily available in stores.
The government may be wary of spending tens of millions trying to eradicate the mouse plague, when a cold snap or heavy rain could wipe it out naturally.
Industry group NSW Farmers has applied for an emergency permit to use the pesticide zinc phosphide.
A federal government spokeswoman says that while pests are primarily the responsibility of state and territory governments, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority has so far issued an emergency zinc phosphide permit to Cotton Australia and is reviewing two more is.
Locals hope that the region’s heavy rains this week, and more storms forecast in the coming days, will end months of contamination.
Female mice can breed and give birth to 50 pups a year from six weeks old, but locals hope the rain will flood the nests and be the circuit breaker needed to curb the numbers.
“We are hopeful,” said Karanouh. “When that rain comes our way, it sure will make a big dent in it.”