Drein, fire, the Covid-19 pestilence and a plague of rats that consumed everything. The rural area of New South Wales has faced almost all of the biblical challenges that nature has to offer in recent years, but it is now praying for another – an all-powerful flood to drown mice in their dens and clean up the wasteland of rodents . Or some very heavy rain, at least.
It seems that everyone in rural towns in northwestern NSW and southern Queensland has their own history of the rat war. In online posts, they describe how to wake up with rat droppings on their pillows or observe the movement of the soil at night, while hundreds of thousands of rodents flee from the torchlight bundles.
Lisa Gore of Toowoomba told Guardian Australia that her friend removed the fabric from her chair when she started to smell, only to find a nest of baby rats in the stuffing.
Dubbo resident Karen Fox came out of the shower on Friday morning to see a mouse looking at her from the opening in the ceiling. There is nothing she can do, she says, because the traps are exhausted.
In Gulargambone, north of Dubbo, Naav Singh arrives five hours before work at the 5Star supermarket to clean up unwanted visiting worms.
“We don’t want to come in the morning sometimes. It stinks, they are going to die and it is impossible to find all the bodies … Some nights we take more than 400 or 500 ”, he says.
Before opening, Singh must empty the store’s 17 traps, sweep the droppings and throw away all the products the rats attacked.
“We have five or six cans every week just full of groceries that we are throwing away,” he says.
The family business had to drastically reduce inventory, put what it could in thick containers, use empty refrigerators to store the rest. Nothing in the store is safe, with mice even chewing on plastic bottles of soft drinks. “They were running faster after that,” jokes Singh.
After years of drought, rural NSW and parts of Queensland have had an abundant crop due to the recent rainy season. But this influx of new products and grains led to an explosion in the mouse population. Locals say they began to notice swarms in the north in October and the wave of rodents has spread to the south ever since, growing in biblical proportions.
Singh estimates that the plague has so far cost businesses more than $ 30,000 and is not sure how much longer they can continue.
“It has been going on for three months. It will be very difficult, we lost a lot of customers ”, he says.
Local residents say the plague affected people’s daily lives so much that the start of a normal conversation shifted from a comment on the weather to comparing how many mice they had caught the night before.
Pip Goldsmith in Coonamble knew that she would have to set traps in her home and in the fields when the rats started to descend, but she had no idea that she would also need to do the same in her car.
“I realized that there was a packet of biscuits with seeds that had fallen out of a shopping bag in the back seat … the mice chewed the box and ate each seed. There’s nothing left, ”she says.
“That night I set up six traps and kept checking them. I think I caught almost 20 mice before midnight. “
Goldsmith’s car-only count is now over 100, and she thinks the total stuck in her home would be in the thousands.
“They stink, whether they’re alive or dead, sometimes you can’t escape the smell … it’s overwhelming, but we’re tough.”
The plague gave rise to a new form of morbid family bonding, with children enlisted as frontline soldiers in the fight against rodents.
“I have a four and a five year old, we had a lot of fun designing our traps with buckets and bottles of wine … they are very quick to catch and discard mice. It makes you proud and sick at the same time, ”says Goldsmith.
Gore, in Queensland, says his 12-year-old son has taken on the role of the main anti-worms soldier in the house.
“He leaves at 6 pm and sets the traps, then goes in for about an hour and then goes out, empties and sets again, and continues to do this four or five times,” she says.
“The record is 183 in one night … It’s like his job at the moment. He is very proud of himself, ”she says.
Lucy Moss, the owner of the Mink and Me cafe in Coonamble, says she had to pay to fix her refrigerator seven times after the rat bodies clogged the machinery.
“The mice get into the fan at the bottom and have a lot of fun and then the fan turns on and they can’t get out,” she says.
That alone has cost you thousands.
The rats ruined a shed full of hay on Moss’s farm that she was saving in case of another drought.
“They go to the hay and are urinating and everything. It is a health risk to feed cows and sheep, so we destroy it, ”she says. “That was our safety net.”
Hay can cost farmers $ 500 a bundle to buy in a drought, and Coonamble Mayor Al Karanouh says farmers have lost $ 40 million in their county alone.
“Some farmers have lost up to 2,500 bales … There is not enough money for the municipality to do anything to help. All we can do is prevent them from entering our offices, our machines, our tractors, our trucks. They eat all the wiring, ”he says.
Karanouh and dozens of other mayors have asked the state government to declare the rat problem as an official plague and help provide additional bait, but so far they have declined.
“I cannot understand why [they won’t declare it]. It is worse than the plague of rats in 1984, ”says Karanouh.
“I don’t think they want to do that because they are going to have to shell out a lot of money.”
Guardian Australia understands that the NSW government has started to model how effective financial support for farmers would be, but no decision has been made.
In a statement, a spokesman for Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall said that “both the Department of Primary Industries and Local Land Services are providing information and assistance to landowners on how to control rats on farms”, but indicates that commercial rat baits are already readily available in stores.
The government may be afraid to spend up to tens of millions to try to eradicate the plague of mice, when a cold wave or heavy rains can naturally eliminate them.
The NSW Farmers industrial group has applied for an emergency license for the use of the zinc phosphide pesticide.
A federal government spokeswoman said that while the pests are “primarily the responsibility of state and territorial governments”, the Australian Pesticide and Veterinary Medicines Authority has so far granted an emergency zinc phosphide license to Cotton Australia and is evaluating more two.
Residents are hopeful that heavy rains in the region this week, and more storms expected in the coming days, will end the months of infestation.
Female rats are able to breed from six weeks of age and give birth to 50 offspring per year, but locals are hopeful that rain will flood the nests and provide the necessary breaker to contain the number.
“We are hopeful,” says Karanouh. “If this rain comes towards us, it will certainly affect a lot.”