Plagues of Pests and Tests of Patience

Central West New South Wales, Australia in in the grip of a mouse plague.  Some households in town are saying that it is not unusual to get 120 mice per night.  It is not the mice but what they do - destroy crops, eat vegetables out of the garden get into pantries and destroy food stores and invade the bed.
The other thing that is problematic is the diseases they spread.  There are many ways that we can catch a disease from rodents:

   Inhalation or direct contact with rodent excreta (urine, faeces, saliva)
   Handling or inhaling microorganism particles aerosolised from hay, woodpiles or other materials contaminated with infectious rodent urine
   Particles aerosolised by sweeping rodent infested spaces
   Handling of infected rodents by hunters or other people
   Bites from rodents — microorganisms carried in saliva can infect both humans and other rodents
   Scratches from rodents
   Drinking contaminated water or eating contaminated food
   Rodents acting as sources for infecting ectoparasites (ticks, fleas, mites, lice) with various pathogens
   Dogs, cats and foxes (especially urban) eating rodents and then catching parasites such as tapeworms that can be passed on to humans by them (https://www.rentokil.com/au/rodent-borne-diseases/)

Not only does the plague cause physical problems but psychological illness.  The fact that mice, their smell and faeces are everywhere around the house is daunting, especially for the clean obsessed.  It is never clean, the cleaning is tiring and the smell nauseating.  There is a psychological toll, and this is never more so than when, having had what appears to be a good night's sleep one wakes to see mouse shit on the pillow and a dead mouse between the sheet and the under-blanket that, during the night, you have rolled over on.  The stress, cleaning and worry about the risk of infection does your head in if you let it.

So what to do?  Firstly accept that it is a plague and since biblical times, they have existed.  Secondly, each plague has eventually passed only to be replaced by another down the track.  So a reality check - plagues happen and we are never far from the next one.  For millennia people have been cleaning up after one plague and in the main, psychological injury is usually far more diverse than physical injury.

While the plague exists we must wash our coffee cups before making a cuppa, wash tins before opening them and store food in mouse proof containers.  Just a thought: you know when there are too many mice, the cats just lie on the floor and watch the mice running around them.  Too full and too tired to care.

What plagues occur around the world? And what is the impact on individuals and communities?

Have found the following article in one of our local posts.  Ear muffs will be required: 105 dB

Sifting through a shovel load of dirt in a suburban backyard, US couple Michael Raupp and Paula Shrewsbury find their quarry: a cicada nymph.
And then another. And another. And four more.
In maybe a third of a square foot of dirt, the University of Maryland entomologists find at least seven cicadas, a rate just shy of a million per acre.
A nearby yard yielded a rate closer to 1.5 million.
And there's much more afoot.
Trillions of the red-eyed black insects are coming, scientists say.
Within days, a couple of weeks at most, the cicadas of Brood X (the X is the Roman numeral for 10) will emerge after 17 years underground.
There are many broods of periodic cicadas that appear on rigid schedules in different years, but this is one of the largest and most noticeable.
They’ll be in 15 states from Indiana to Georgia to New York; they’re coming out now in mass numbers in Tennessee and North Carolina.
When the entire brood emerges, backyards can look like undulating waves, and the bug chorus is lawnmower loud.
The cicadas will mostly come out at dusk to try to avoid everything that wants to eat them, squiggling out of holes in the ground.
They’ll try to climb up trees or anything vertical, including Mr Raupp and Ms Shrewsbury.
Once off the ground, they shed their skins and try to survive that vulnerable stage before they become dinner to a host of critters including ants, birds, dogs, cats and Mr Raupp.
It’s one of nature’s weirdest events, featuring sex, a race against death, evolution and what can sound like a bad science fiction movie soundtrack.
America is the only place in the world that has periodic cicadas that stay underground for either 13 or 17 years, says entomologist John Cooley of the University of Connecticut.
The bugs only emerge in large numbers when the ground temperature reaches 18 degrees.
That’s happening earlier in the calendar in recent years because of climate change, says entomologist Gene Kritsky. Before 1950 they used to emerge at the end of May; now they’re coming out weeks earlier.
Cicadas who come out early don’t survive. They’re quickly eaten by predators.
Cicadas evolved a key survival technique: overwhelming numbers.
https://www.9news.com.au/world/trillions-of-redeyed-cicadas-about-to-emerge-after-17-years-underground/9e8e9146-6129-49a4-be59-fc5cfbfccd71

OK. This is pet peeve of mine. 105 db has no meaning. Decibel is a way of comparing two things to each other. Either a  gain or loss. When it comes to sound it is a way of comparing the minimum sound the average human ear (as determined by the Fletcher/Munson tests during a world's fair)  can detect to a different volume of sound. So technically that 105db is written as 105dbspl. (sound pressure level)

There are other references used for other things such as wattage. The point is db is a way of comparing TWO things. So a number without the reference is meaningless. Rant over.

Paul, I am curious how the mouse plague wound down. Any lingering effects for you?

Jeremy VanGelder wrote:Paul, I am curious how the mouse plague wound down. Any lingering effects for you?

Mouse plagues are great opportunities for predators but they get sick of eating them. Our predators include birds of prey, snakes and cats.  To a lesser extent, dogs chickens and smaller native carnivores.  The rest of the mice die out during winter.  For us, the worst thing is when one dies in the back of the stove or in the roof cavity.  They stink to high heavens for weeks.  The saving grace is meat ants that can demolish a mouse in a couple of days.  It is amazing to see a single line going across the floor or up the wall and grey fur moving as if by itself back to the nest. For others, the mice chew car wiring and get into electronics which can be costly.  Traditional reduction methods such as bating and trapping have limited impact as far as I can see.

Just after the plague, we were at a property west of here that uses regen agriculture.  they lost 20% of their sown seed.  The place next door which uses conventional tilling lost almost all of its seed because the mice track along the furrows and are protected by the covering soil.  One tick for regen.