Mouse Plagues

The following excerpts were from a book ?Boots and All? on an oral history of farming in Victoria and edited by Catherine Watson. ISBN 0 909313 24 5.   Some of our early Australians recount their experiences of the rat and mouse plagues.

Wilbur Howcroft was born at Kerang in 1917 before moving to Culgoa where he experienced his first mouse plague.  He writes, ?I think most of us who grew up in that era and that neighbourhood will agree you can have your droughts, you can have poor wheat prices, you can have mortgages, but the mouse plagues were the worst.  You couldn?t tell anyone what it was like ? they?d think you were exaggerating.  Still to this day, they don?t know the reason.  We?re still getting them but they don?t affect us so much now for various reasons.  For instance, you have tables with aluminium legs that they can?t crawl up.  We?ve got refrigerators; we?ve got wheat silos and barns to keep them out.  But they could literally get into anything.  They?d even eat the handles off the old kitchen knives!  Handles then were made of compressed milk, as were buttons, and they?d eat these.  They?d eat clothes.  I?m not exaggerating what they would eat and do.

Every plague ends the same way.  Something happens and they?ll start eating the ones that get sick, and once you see that, it?s great rejoicing because you know the time?s near when the plague?s almost over.  Pesticides were useless.  They were in countless millions.  It was no good trying to kill them.?

Ellen Howcroft (mother to Wilbur).  She was called Nell.  She says ?We?d kill a pig once a year.  We?d keep it in a little yard and give it slops ? and we used to pickle our own bacon.  We?d hang it up on the ceiling get dry and get smoked.  Once we had a mouse plague, and one morning my father thought he?s like some of that bacon, but when he took it down, there was nothing but the skin left.  The mice had got up and crawled along and eaten all the middle out.?

Beth MacDonald (nee Arnold) was born in July of 1903.  She remembers the mouse plagues like this ?If you went up to the chaff house or up near the haystack after dark, you?d hear rustle, rustle, rustle.  The mice were just black all around the haystack, and there was no good poisoning them or setting traps ? that was just too pussy.  So they used to set kerosene tins in the ground full of water and let them run along.  They?d put them down fresh at night.  In the morning the mice would be walking over the dead ones, it was so full, and then they all had to be buried.  So the mouse plague was a dreadful time.  It caused a lot of work.  The boys would be sitting at the table having a meal and the mice would run up their legs.?

William McIntosh ? he grew up in Ellam.  ?That?s Mallee backwards.  My dad was there when it was named at a meeting.  They reckoned they (the residents of that part of the country) were a backward sort of lot, so they called it Mallee backwards.

In 1916 we had the mouse plague.  We had no barns.  The seed was out in the open and the mice got into it.  We had to make a stand to save the wheat.  The old house got full of mice.  They ate holes in the ceilings, eating the flour they used to stick the papering on with.  We fenced in the house with corrugated iron, and then laid poison.  The next day they gathered up about 1,000 mice and one dog - we forgot to tie him up.  We had quite a few cats about the place.  They all died from eating them and when we were carting hay we counted how many mice the greyhound ate while we were loading the stocks of hay.  It was about 70 and we would cart about 6 loads a day.  The dog died later on.

We had lovely fat turkeys.  They used to go around the stacks of a morning picking mice out of the stack.  We couldn?t eat them on that account.  We should have sent them to Melbourne; they?d relish them there.  They were as fat as ? but it killed them.  Everything that ate mice died.  It could be the fur.  We had horses and cows die too from eating chaff and we used to get sores on our hands from handling stuff where the mice had been ? like ringworm.  From the urine and the smell of them.  We used to shove a bit of Condy?s crystals on it.  That cleared it up.  I?ve seen the wheat lumpers just covered in sores from it, right up their arms, like ringworm.  It was a terrific disaster.  That was before they built silos.  In a few weeks they were just a heap of loose bags.  They used to catch mice by the ton and bury them at the Ellam station.  You could smell the wheat stacks two miles away.  You couldn?t poison them because of the wheat.  But they get that thick that they die in the end.?

Joe Gibson   He remembers what it was like when they had a rat plague.  ?We used to grow oats and chaff, but then the rat plague came here and for many years we couldn?t keep nothin?.  Oh, they were a bad thing!  Course; there was no way to poison them out, only with arsenic or that.  We used that, but you see, your cat would eat the dead rat and they were poisoned.  It was about 1918, I think, before the silos came.  You wouldn?t see anything but thousands of bags in the wheat stacks at Tocumwal.  And when the rat plague came there wasn?t a sound bag nor a bit of wheat in a bag.  The plague cleaned out all of them, and never left a grain of wheat in the ground on hundreds and hundreds of acres.

The mice too were in plague proportions and were just an awful pest.   It looked as if they?d just come out of the sky. We had a big house at Waverley lined with paper and Hessian and they ate it all.  I seen a fella lift a skin off the floor and there wasn?t room for another mouse to get under it.  Then they just disappeared.  It?s been explained to me that there didn?t seem to be no buck-mice and no she-mice and they were just a plague on their own, you know.  But it had a name; hermaphrodites ? something like that.  It?d eat your harness.  You should see what they?d ate, destroyed our ropes and that.  They got right into the mountains and we couldn?t leave anything  there.  No other plagues:  mice and rats were the two worst.

UGH! The Great Australian Bite

These excerpts came from a book written by Madame Souris (Mrs. Mouse).

Australia has the biggest and most amazing mouse plagues.  More than thirty million mice were trapped in four months at one location in 1917.  One farmer put down poisoned meat and next morning he picked up 28,000 corpses and only stopped ?because I was tired?.  Another farmer said of the 1984 plague:  ?You kill one bloody mouse and 10,000 turn up at his funeral.?

In an Australian plague, aircraft skid when they land on a carpet of moving mice.  Trains slither off tracks covered with layers of mice.  Cars slide powerless when the brakes are applied.

The mice eat putty, steel wool, furniture and electrical wires and clothes.  People brush mice off their clothes.  They eat the Pill, thereby providing plenty of good birth control jokes.  They pull out the hair of sleeping humans to line their nests, if they feel broody.  Hospital beds collapse as mice gnaw through the wooden legs.

Daphne Sutherland, a farmer?s wife in the prosperous farmlands around Young, muzzles the family Labrador because it keeps eating mice and gets fat.  She was asked if the dog chewed them.  ?I think they just run straight down,? she replied.

Cats stick out a paw to catch a meal, and there is no limit to snacks.  Most farm cats run away and turn wild; after gorging themselves some weigh sixteen kilos, which is heavier then the average dingo.  Sheep, pigs, cattle and other farm animals have to be fed by hand.  The snakes grow big and shiny.

The barmaid at the Railway Hotel in Koorawatha tells how every trap is re-occupied immediately it is emptied.  Near Cactus in South Australia a family on a camping holiday awoke to find the floor and part of the sides of their tent eaten away.  Another family fled by rowboat pursued for thirty minutes by hundreds of swimming mice determined on climbing aboard.

Australia has no Pied Piper so where do the mice go?  Everyone prays for a freezing cold winter to kill of the hordes.  Some turn inventor and create fantastic traps, which drown, suffocate, electrocute or squash their victims.  If all this fails there is one final hope: cannibalism.  When it comes to the crunch few mice can resist a tasty meal of a fellow traveller.

More Rodents Rampant

Not only Australia has plagues of mice.  Aristotle wrote about them more than 2,351 years ago and the first book of Samuel in the Bible records horrible happenings between the Philistines and mice.

California once had as many as 80,000 mice per acre swarming across the countryside.  In the days of pre-Nazi Norway, a steamship ploughed through shoals of lemmings (mice-like rodents) for fifteen minutes.  France, Germany, Yugoslavia, England, Wales, Chile, Egypt and countries on five continents have reported plagues.

The mice eventually disappear, eaten by predators, killed off by cold weather or overcome by disease.  Canadian zoologists are the only ones I know to keep a balanced view in the gruesome times of plagues.  They simply call them ?an outburst of mousemeat?.

Practicalities

This was taken from a book by Elizabeth James called Practicalities and was based on the ABC Radio Series.

In 1984 large parts of western New South Wales and Victoria were dogged by a long lasting mouse plague, which not only damaged crops severely but also tested to the limit the patience of the people whose farms and houses were being overrun by these unwelcome visitors.  All sorts of methods to get rid of them were tried and tested but it seemed nothing worked.  Even the cats gave up in disgust.  Eventually, the mice did disappear.

During the plague Practicalities ran a competition to see if anybody could come up with a new and imaginative solution to the problem of getting rid of unwanted mice and the response was lively.  A lot of listeners put forward interesting designs for new traps; others preferred to take a preventative approach.  One suggestion was to dig a drain around a building to make a kind of anti-mouse moat.  One listener said we should create large ?shelter belts? around paddocks where natural predators are allowed to multiply, keep the rats and mice under control and consequently redress the natural balance.

More practical were suggestions to plug up all holes in buildings with steel wool and nail rubber tyre tubing to the bottom of doors.

A letter we read out on the program with an ancient Roman recipe for Stuffed Doormice inspired another group of listeners.  Part of the proposed campaign was to turn the mouse into a gourmet food.  Mouse Mousse and Mouse Loaf recipes started turning up in the Practicalities letterbox.  Most people suggested that mice could be processed into a cheaper pet food ? one grizzly solution to the problem.

There was general concern amongst listeners that normal chemical rodenticides were too dangerous, especially to household pets, which seem to like eating them.

Our winner put forward the following idea.  As well as the normal procedure of removing all loose food and covering up all containers, she places dried herbs throughout the house wherever rats and mice have been seen.  Mice hate the blend of rosemary, mint, tansy, wormwood, thyme, southernwood and cloves and disappear while they can smell them.

Dr. Trevor Redhead is a senior research fellow at the CSIRO.  He became interested in mice and their extraordinarily volatile populations in the late ?seventies? after years of studying rats.  The last mouse plague was undoubtedly good for his research but, as he admits, not much fun for anyone else.  He explained how future mouse plagues could be predicted.

?Mouse plagues are so irregular in occurrence that people tend to forget over time just what the last plague was like.  Unless you can prepare for a coming mouse plague and get things in order before it arrives, when it does strike there are so many mice that poison operations are ineffective in reducing the damage and losses that the farmers suffer.  Actually preventing a mouse plague is enormously difficult.  I think a lot of people underestimate just how difficult the task is.  We?ve become so used to a world of high technology that we tend to forget there are a lot of very cleverly designed animals and plants, which are very effective in their own environment.

I?ve worked on two mouse plagues, one in 1980 and the other in 1984.  The cause of the 1980 plague we put down to above-average rains in the autumn of 1978.  We were able to follow mouse populations right through 1978 and 1979, reaching their peak and subsequent crash in 1980.  Our hypothesis then and now is that autumn rain extends the period for which mice can breed.  Normally they breed through late spring and summer and then stop in autumn.  The autumn rains clearly allowed mice to continue to breed through the winter of 1978.  Not only did they continue to breed but individuals grew very quickly.  That meant there were a lot of larger than normal mice that helped increase the following year?s reproduction.  Being large they produced a lot of young and a large proportion of them survived through to the next winter.  Two years later there were so many mice present at the beginning of the breeding season that a massive production of young was inevitable.

Unfortunately, we simply don?t have the weapons to help combat these plagues.  I think the main thing farmers can do is to protect these things such as tractors and wheat, which are valuable.  Physical barriers like galvanised iron fences sunk into the ground can protect these.  If they?re nearly a metre high, mice can?t jump over or burrow underneath them.  That?s the most effective control for highly valued possessions.  Crops present a much more difficult situation.  The 1984 plague in Victoria caused in excess of thirteen million dollars worth of damage to crops still in the field.

Alas, to research mouse plagues, to some extent we must wait for the next plague trigger to occur, make a prediction and then test it to see if our ideas were correct.  We?ve been looking at a potential biological control using a parasite of mice.  From laboratory experiments we know this parasite reduces the fertility of female mice.  Another area we have been investigating is the use of attractants to increase the effectiveness of poisons.  Essentially we?re interested in methods, which can reduce the number of mice before they start to breed.  It?s too late after they?ve bred.

The period between mouse plagues is very variable.  It just depends on the weather conditions.  The old cliché is that the period between mouse plagues is usually longer than a parliamentarian?s stand in Parliament.  So if a politician gets one mouse plague, it?s likely he or she won?t get another.

One' Night's catch at Kaneira during the mouse plague 1919 The pile contained 150,000 mice and weighed two and a half tons

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