Ddrought, fire, the Covid-19 plague and an all-encompassing plague of mice. Rural New South Wales has faced almost every biblical challenge to nature in recent years, but now another is being prayed for – an almighty flood to drown the mice in their holes and the devastated land of the rodents. Or at least very heavy rain.
Everyone in the rural towns in northwestern NSW and southern Queensland seems to have their own mouse war story. In online reports, they give details of waking up with mouse feces on their pillows or watching the ground move at night while hundreds of thousands of rodents flee from torchbearers.
Lisa Gore of Toowoomba told Guardian Australia her friend stripped the back of her armchair when it started to smell, only to find a nest of baby mice in the stuffing.
Dubbo resident Karen Fox walked out of the shower Friday morning to see a mouse stare at her from the ceiling ventilation. She can do nothing, she says, because the shops are sold out of traps.
In Gulargambone, north of Dubbo, Naav Singh arrives five hours too early for work at the 5Star supermarket to clean up after the uninvited pest visitors.
‘We do not want to go in the morning sometimes. It stinks, they will die and it is impossible to find all the corpses … Some nights we catch more than 400 or 500, ‘he says.
Before opening, Singh must empty the 17 traps of the store, wipe up the garbage, and dispose of products that attacked the mice.
“We have five or six bins every week that are just filled with groceries that we throw out,” he says.
The family business had to drastically reduce the stock, put everything in thick containers and use empty refrigerators to store the rest. Nothing in the store is safe, and mice even chew in plastic soft drink bottles. “They ran around faster after that,” jokes Singh.
After years of drought, rural NSW and parts of Queensland have suffered a major harvest due to the recent wet season. But this influx of new products and pellets has led to an explosion in the mouse population. Locals said they began spotting the swarms in the north in October and the wave of rodents has since spread south and grown to biblical proportions.
Singh estimates that the plague has cost the company $ 30,000 so far, and he is not sure how long it will last.
“It’s been three months. It is going to be really difficult, we have lost so many customers, ”he says.
Locals say the plague has affected people’s daily lives in this way. The usual conversation started from a comment about the weather to comparing how many mice they had caught the night before.
Pip Goldsmith in Coonamble knew she would have to set traps in her home and fields if the mice started to descend, but had no idea she would have to do the same in her car.
“I realized that a packet of seed cookies had fallen out of a shopping bag in the back seat … the mice chewed through the box and ate each seed. There was nothing left, ”she says.
‘That night I set up six traps and just kept going. I think I caught almost 20 mice before midnight. ”
The count of Goldsmith’s car alone is now over 100 and she thinks the total trapped at her home would be thousands.
“They stink whether they’re alive or dead, sometimes you can not escape the smell … it’s oppressive, but we’re resilient.”
The plague gave rise to a new form of morbid family ties, with children appointed as frontline soldiers in the rodent fight.
‘I have a four- and a five-year-old, we have a lot of fun designing our traps with buckets and wine bottles … they are very quick at catching and throwing away mice. It makes you proud and arrogant at the same time, ”says Goldsmith.
Gore in Queensland says her 12-year-old son has taken on the role of general secretary of the house.
“He goes out at 6pm and puts the traps on, and then he’s going to come in about an hour, then he goes out and empties it again and only keeps it on four or five times,” she says.
‘The record is 183 in one night … It’s how she works at the moment. He is very proud of himself, ”she says.
Lucy Moss, owner of the Mink and Me cafe in Coonamble, says she had to pay to have her fridge fixed seven times after the bodies of dead mice clogged the machinery.
“The mice come down in the fan and have a good old time and then the fan turns on and can’t get out,” she says.
That alone cost her thousands.
Mice destroyed a barn full of hay on Moss’ farm that she saved in case of another drought.
‘They move in the hay and urinate and everything. It is a health hazard to feed the cows and sheep, so we destroyed it, ‘she says. “It was our safety net.”
Hay can cost farmers $ 500 a bale to buy in a drought, and Coonamble Mayor Al Karanouh says farmers lost only $ 40 million.
‘Some farmers have lost as many as 2,500 bales … There is not enough money for the council to help anything. All we can do is prevent them from entering our offices, machinery, tractors and 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 plague and to help deliver additional bait, but so far they have not been prepared.
‘I can not understand why [they won’t declare it]. It’s worse than the mice in 1984, ”says Karanouh.
“I think they do not want to do that because they will have to shell out a lot of money.”
Guardian Australia understands that the NSW government has started modeling how effective financial support would be to farmers, but no decision has been made.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture, Adam Marshall, said “both the Department of Primary Industries and local land services provide information and assistance to landowners on how to control mice on farms”, but indicate that commercial mice bait is already readily available. available in stores.
The government may be wary of spending up to ten million to eradicate the mouse plague, when a cold blow or heavy rain can, of course, wipe it out.
The industry group NSW Farmers has requested an emergency permit to use the pesticide zinc phosphide.
A federal government spokesman says although pests are “primarily the responsibility of state and territorial governments”, the Australian Pesticide and Veterinary Medicines Authority has so far granted Cotton Australia one emergency zinc phosphide permit and assessed two more.
Locals are hopeful that heavy rains in the region this week, and more storms predicted in the coming days, will bring the infestation months to an end.
Female mice can breed from six weeks of age and give birth to 50 young per year, but the locals are hopeful that the rain will flood the nests and provide the circuit breaker needed to limit numbers.
“We are hopeful,” Karanouh said. “If the rain comes our way, it’s definitely going to be a big dive.”