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EEVblog Pets
GlennSprigg:
--- Quote from: Fraser on September 28, 2019, 02:43:47 pm ---Thanks for not killing the mice 👍🙂❤️
Fraser
--- End quote ---
You reminded me though, that many decades ago here in Australia, we had HUGE mouse plagues!!
I remember back in about 1965/1970(?), on my uncles crop farms in Victoria, he would take us out
at night, in an old Model-T Ford work vehicle, with the back stripped off & a home-made tray-top, for
picking up stumps in the paddocks for the fireplace. He would shine the headlights out over the
fields from an elevated vantage point, and I SWEAR that the WHOLE GROUND was moving, as far
as the eye could see, with literally MILLIONS of Mice!!!
Sheds full of thousands of Wheat-Bags of grain, when you opened the doors, were absolutely
covered with THOUSANDS of Mice, chewing through the bags & helping themselves, uncontrolled!!!
Even when the 'plague' died away, they would have many 'traps' inside the homestead....
MANY large beer bottles with socks pulled over the bottom, up to the tapered part, laying on their
sides with the neck over the edge of tables/benches etc,with some cheese bunged into the end.
Underneath that, were large buckets, half filled with water!! The mice would climb up onto the
bottles, slip off the slippery end and fall into the water. Each bucket in the mornings would have
up to 100 mice in each!!! Desperate times called for desperate measures......
Rerouter:
A cheeky girl caught sleeping on my ankle.
She knows basic phrases, all of the ring tones and message tones in the house, the microwave, the smoke alarm, the TV jingle,
Nice to walk out your door every morning and have "Good morning!" called out to you.
Nominal Animal:
"Vermin" are vermin only when they get into the wrong place (food storage, insulation, indoors), or are too numerous, unbalancing the ecosystem or carrying disease.
Years ago, a family of stoats lived in a stone hedge only meters of my mom's house. (This is north of the Arctic Circle, by the way.) Because mom is a keen potato and veggie farmer, there was an abundance of bank voles, and the stoats kept the population in check. Way before that, we used to have a dog, a Finnish Spitz, that took care of the task. (They have an affinity for catching voles, mice, and especially squirrels.) Currently, mom has been using battery-operated thumpers in the veggie plots, which seem to drive the voles away.
The bank voles there do carry the Puumala orthohantavirus (haemorrhagic fever), but it is fatal in less than 0.5% of cases, and the typical transmission vector is via dust from droppings. So, mostly you just need to remember to wear a mask when sweeping or cleaning storage areas.
I find the bank voles quite cute, almost as cute as shrews (which aren't rodents) of the Sorex genus. The mouse in GlennSpriggs picture looks very much like a bank vole to me, except for the ear shape maybe.
Yansi:
Please post cats here: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/post-a-picture-of-a-cat!
^-^
//EDIT: URL corrected.
Gregg:
Here's Bucky who became a regular pest for about a week; not at all afraid of me.
First pic is from about 2 meters away, he is nibbling on maple leaves. The second is about ten seconds after I tried to stop him from trying out his new sharp antlers on the front bumper of my truck. I warned him that he better head to the hills before hunting season started or he would certainly become venison. He might have understood because two days before hunting season started he disappeared.
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