Plague of Mice in Australia Overruns Farms, Shops and Bedrooms
(NYT) TOTTENHAM, Australia — The stench hits you first, pungent, musty and rotting. Then you hear them: a sound like ocean waves, or pouring rain hitting concrete. And the occasional squeak.
The horror lurking in the darkness is a throng of thousands of mice swarming above, around and inside a storage bunker of wheat at the Fragar family’s farm seven hours west of Sydney, Australia. After a long and painful drought, the mice are ravaging the family’s first good harvest in years and endangering the next one, putting their business on the brink of ruin.
Their farm is just one of thousands along the country’s eastern grain belt that are contending with what local residents call the worst mouse plague in living memory, with far-reaching consequences both in the fields and in rural communities.
It’s like “watching the mice eat away at your future,” said Kathy Fragar, 51.
For what has been half a year but felt to many like an eternity, the rodents have chewed a swath through southern Queensland, New South Wales and northern Victoria, the flip side to the good fortune of the break in a once-a-century drought. ............(more)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/world/australia/mouse-plague.html
