Australians overwhelmed by a mouse plague sweeping across rural towns have been forced to spread peanut butter onto bin lids in a desperate attempt to trap and kill the masses of rodents.
Farmers based in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland have endured plagues of rodents in recent months, which have destroyed large volumes of stock.
A fed up woman in Tamworth, in northern NSW, explained she’d bought a bin with a swinging lid to use as a cheap alternative to a mouse trap after struggling to find one in stores.
She said when the mice crawled onto the lid to taste the peanut butter they would fall down inside the bin, which she would then fill with water to drown them.
A woman in Tamworth said in a desperate attempt to catch the mice overrunning her home, she put peanut butter on the lid of her rubbish bin
‘I have the bin in the corner of two brick walls so the mice have been climbing up the bricks to get to the top of the bin but if that’s not an option I’d suggest some kind of ramp for them to climb up,’ the woman wrote on Facebook.
The grim method was quickly picked up by other rural residents in NSW who struggled to find a real mouse trap, with many admitting it was slowly ridding their homes of the unwanted guests.
In the wake of heavy floods and record-breaking rainfall across Australia’s east coast countless rural properties have become overrun with mice.
The rodents have caused headaches for farmers trying to protect their crops.
In March paramedic Louise Hennessy discovered close to a dozen rodents dead in a rural resident’s water tank which supplies drinking water to locals.
She uncovered the ‘horrifying’ sight at Elong Elong, in the New South Wales central west region, where mice have been ravaging food crops.
Dead mice are seen at a property in Coonamble in central west NSW, Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Ms Hennessey posted an image of the dead mice and clumps of fur tangled in the filter to social media as health authorities begged residents to take precautions to protect themselves against the potentially fatal disease leptospirosis.
The disease is spread from animals to humans by bacteria found in infected animal urine and tissues and is most commonly reported in Australia when the country is in the grips of a mouse plague.
In Coonamble, about two hours north of Dubbo in central western NSW, resident Anne Cullen said mice were running rampant across the town as recently as March – and she even woke up with a rodent in her hair one morning.
‘It’s terrible. It’s unbelievable. I came home after a couple of nights away staying down in Dubbo with my daughter, and I went into the house, there were just mice running everywhere,’ she told the Today show.
‘They have eaten my clothes. They have gotten into my wardrobe. There are holes in the couches. They are eating everything.’
In early February, Ben Storer filmed the mice as he drove through the horde in a ute on his family farm in Warren in central northern NSW (pictured)
She said farmers in the town were having to burn crops that weren’t safely stored in silos because of contamination.
In early February Ben Storer filmed a wave of the mice as he drove through them in a ute on his family farm in Warren, NSW.
The video showed mice running in all directions, surrounding an empty grain shed and crawling over a surface drill.
Mr Storer’s wife Tanya said ‘everything is being affected’ by the mouse plague, which hit their family farm after the last harvest in November 2020.
Making matters worse, Steve Henry, a long-standing Research Officer with CSIRO, recently warned mice will continue to savage crops across the nation long term.
‘Mice need a constant source of food, conditions where they can comfortably survive and the ability to reproduce,’ the experienced Canberra-based mouse researcher told Daily Mail Australia.
‘We have just come off a relatively cool summer (in Australia) where it rained consistently in most parts, and autumn has proven to be favourable for the mice as well.
‘They can start breeding when they are six-weeks-old, so if conditions suit, numbers can be substantial… and I think that will be the case over the next 12 months.’
Farmers have collected scores of rodents across Australia (pictured above) who have been causing havoc with stock
