RAVAGES OF MICE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 77, Issue 151, 28 June 1934, Page 10

RAVAGES OF MICE

DAMAGE IN QUEENSLAND FORMER PLAGUE BECAI .LED NEW SOUTH WALES’ 72,000 BAG Reports of the recent ravages of mice on the Downs in Queensland, recall the damages caused Uy millions of these pests which invaded the wheat districts of the south-west of New South Wales about JOl6. Here the farmers, millers and wheat brokers, says the Brisbane Telegraph, sudored losses amounting to many thousands of pounds. Great stacks of grain at the ] sidings awaiting despatch to the mills and the seaboard were reduced to shapeless masses of waste graiu and husks. Backs were so riddled with holos that they were a total loss, and grain that was not eaten was not worth rebagging, because it was so contaminated witn the decaying careases of mice which had been smothered as the stacks collapsed. As the invasion developed all sorts of devices were resorted to to destroy the pests and to protect property from their ravages. Fences wore formed by laying sheets of galvanised non end to end completely round the wheat stacks, and farmers tell ol occasions when they found that mice, in- their search for food, had clustered in sucti masses agaiust the improvised fence that numbers of them had been able to gam access to the grain by climbing over the backs of their fellows. Alice were everywhere, even out. m 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 he 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 the Trapping went on extensively ond the most effective traps were (hose which lured the mice into a bucket or tub of water. One storekeeper had kerosene tins lot into the ground atintervals around his bulkstore. Across the open top of the tins were pieces OI wire On which threaded jam tins sprinkled with flour. Mice seeking a meal from the flour found the tin revolving and themselves precipitated below into a gallon or so ot water. This storekeeper kept a tally of b» own “bag.” This he did unti his patience became exhausted round about the 72,000 mark. He did not account, each mouse caught, but estimated them by the kerosene tinful. Suffocated by Numbers. For some strange reason, perhaps.to get the benefit of the warintu, Hire had a fondness for gathering in aige numbers in stocks of superphosphate. This could not have had any appea for them as a food; nevertheless, that section of a barn or storeroom invariably was found to be literally aliveor as it turned out in one particular case, dead —with the pests. A partv of men removing a stock of “•super”" found at the completion of their task that so many mice had perished-suffocated by the weight ot their own numbers swarming back as the bags of sfiperphospato were re-moved-that it required 21 ke.os ( ne tins of accomodate the dead. I his, of course, in addition to the hundreds that made their escape. May hundreds of tons of hay in stacks were rendered almost valueless. Mice burrowed through and through the stacks, eating the gram from tne cars, leaving only stalks that were so contaminated that in most cases they were no use as fodder.