Finest tricks to lure rodents as infestations devastate farms

An NSW farmer claims he has the solution to the state’s devastating mouse plague – and all you need is a bucket, empty wine bottle, sock, or old pair of jeans and peanut butter.

Cattle farmer Glenn Daley killed dozens of mice every night on his property in the central west region of Cowra by carving a hole in a bucket, jamming a wine bottle through the hole, and smearing peanut butter on the bottle mouth.

He fastened an old pair of jeans to the end of the bottle to encourage the mice to slip their leg up on the slippery wine bottle while they tried to get a taste of peanut butter.

And if you didn’t have an old jeans leg, a stocking or a sock could also work, said the 48-year-old.

When the mice tried the spread on the top of the bottle, they slipped and fell to their death.

The ongoing rodent infestation in Eastern Australia has forced farmers to make extreme efforts and think outside the box on how to regain control of their land.

Overwhelming infestation has caused an estimated $ 100 million damage and created a mental crisis among desperate farmers in the regions.

Some property owners have lost as much as $ 300,000 to ruined crops when the mice chewed through anything they could bite into.

The Woodstock farmer said his inventive mousetrap was an “old trick” he used to fight the mouse plague in 1984 when he was just 12 years old.

“It works great – it’s very easy to make and really cheap,” he told NCA NewsWire.

“You just set it and forget about it – let it sit for a few days and if you go back and look it might be four or forty mice.”

While Mr Daley said there were more than a hundred rodents hopping around his property, he admitted that it was nowhere near the devastation in other parts of NSW or Queensland.

He likened the disaster to the 1984 mouse plague, in which he was forced to walk around his farm with elastic bands on the bottom of his jeans to prevent mice from crawling up his legs.

“I remember that they (mice) would devastate all the hay bales. If you pick up a bag of grain there’ll be at least a few hundred mice on the floor, ”said Mr. Daley.

“It was like what you are currently seeing in the hardest hit cities. We would light the car lights in the shed at night and it would be like a moving box of gray.

“We had to wash all the dishes before and after using them because they were crawling around in the cupboards. It was just a nightmare. “

At the time, Mr Daley said that farmers in the area were trying “anything and everything” to catch the mice in large numbers, which set off his ingenious mousetrap in 2021.

“I catch somewhere between four and 40 a night in this trap,” he said.

He said his invention was superior to a traditional mousetrap in that it didn’t need to be reset or re-baited.

While NSW has seen the most rodents, Queensland, Victoria, and South Australia are also affected by the scourge.

The infestation has hit schools, hospitals, supermarkets and single family homes, with farmers being hardest hit as they grapple with rising pest control costs and crop destruction.

The mouse plague began in the spring of last year during the harvest season, caused by a combination of ideal weather conditions for breeding and a rich grain harvest.