RAVAGES OF MICE

Evening Star, Issue 21811, 29 August 1934, Page 10

RAVAGES OF MICE

FORMER PLAGUE RECALLED Reports of the recent ravages of mice on the Downs in Queensland, recall the damage caused by millions of these pests which invaded the wheat districts of the south-west of New South Wales about 1916. Here the farmers, millers, and wheat brokers, says the Brisbane ‘ Telegraph,’ suffered losses amounting to many thousands of pounds. Great stacks of gram at the sidings awaiting dispatch to the mills and the seaboard were reduced to shapeless masses of waste grain and husks. Sacks were so riddled with holes that they were a total loss, and grain that was not eaten was not worth' re bagging, because it was so contaminated with the decayed and decaying carcases of mice which had been smothered as the stacks collapsed. As tlie invasion developed all sorts ot devices were resorted to to destroy the pests and to protect property from their ravages. Fences were formed by laying sheets of galvanised iron end to end completely round the wheat sacks, and farmers tell of occasions when they found that mice, in their search for food, had clustered in such masses against the improvised fence that numbers of them had been able to gain access to the grain by climbing over the backs of their fellows.

Mice were everywhere, even put in the open fields, and any sort of object was used as a shelter. Old bags, pieces of timber, boxes, and sheets of iron invariably were found to harbour the pests in dozens. One man stated that lie had seen a sheet of iron in a railway station yard resembling nothing so much as a fringed rug, the fringe being formed of the tails of mice which could not, for the numbers already there, get completely under the shelter of tho iron.

Trapping went on extensively, and the most effective traps were those which lured the mice into a bucket or tub of water. One storekeeper had kerosene tins' let into the ground at intervals around his bulkstore. Across the open top of the tins were pieces of wire on which were threaded jam tins sprinkled with Hour. Mice seeking a meal from the flour found the tin revolving and themselves precipitated below into a gallon or so of water. This storekeeper kept a tally of his own “ bag.” This he did until his patience became exhausted round about the 72,000 mark. He did not count each mouse caught, but estimated them by the kerosene tinful. For some strange reason, perhaps to get the benefit of the warmth, mice had a fondness for gathering in large numbers in stocks of superphosphate. This could not have had any appeal for them as food; nevertheless, that section of a barn or storeroom invariably was found to be literally alive—or as it turned out in one particular case, dead—with the pests. A party of men removing a stock or “ super.”' found at the completion of their task that so many mice had perished—suffocated by the weight of their own numbers swarming back as Uie bags of superphosphate were moved —that it required twenty-one kerosene tins to accommodate the dead. This, or course, in addition to the hundreds that made their escape. Many hundreds of tons of hay in stacks were rendered almost valueless. Mice burrowed through and through the stacks, eating the grain from the ears, leaving only stalks that were so contaminated that in most cases they were no use as fodder.