An ongoing mice plague is continuing to make life interesting for grey nomads travelling in the NSW Central West.
Experts say that the state’s mouse population has grown to plague proportions not seen since the infestation of 2011, which apparently cost farmers more than $200m.
CSIRO researcher Steve Henry told the Sydney Morning Herald that this year’s rains had created perfect mouse-breeding conditions.
″The sizeable crop and moisture in the air allows them to breed and feed,” he said. “This goes on largely undetected until it’s too late.″
Mice normally stop breeding in spring but thanks to 2021’s mild weather and an increase in no-till cropping systems, they have continued to breed throughout summer and may not stop until after autumn.
The SMH reports that from the age of six weeks, a mouse can breed every 10 to 21 days. As soon as it gives birth, it can again be impregnated. This means a single mouse feeding its first litter is also gestating its second, so a pair of average mice can create 500 offspring in a season.
Quirindi grain trader Joe Hallman told the SMH that the rodents were very hard to get rid of.
“People in the bush are resilient, mice smell and they’re horrible for morale but you get on with it,” he said. “When you go to the shops, it’s not toilet paper everyone’s hoarding, it’s Mouse Off and Rat Sack.”
Plenty of grey nomads have also had experience of mice plagues, whether at an earlier stage in their lives when they lived in farms, or as travellers who have seen their camps – and sometimes their rigs – infested.
Journalist Brigid Delaney probably summed as well as anyone up how horrific the rodent experience can be when she recalled camping in the west McDonnell Ranges a few years ago during a mouse plague.
“We were sleeping in swags on camp beds on the ground … hundreds – or was it thousands? – of mice would come to the camp at night, trying to get into the food, and anywhere warm,” she wrote in the Guardian. “It was like free immersion therapy: I would be woken by mice running through my hair, mice in the swag, mice crawling up my legs … shine your torch on the ground and there was an inland sea of them, a gross moving mice-carpet on the ground.”
We travel with our cat, if we were there she wouldn’t know which one to chase.