There's a plague of mice and here's the reason
Mice to see you ... rodents
SEDALIA DEMOCRAT
LARRY the PM’s cat has nabbed his first mouse but he has to up his game – Britain is overrun by the pests.
A mild winter then wet spring and summer have meant lots of food for the little blighters.
A sign at London’s Farringdon Tube station this week warned: “Mice have been attacking customers. Place the bottom of your trousers into socks to avoid being a victim.”
We also told how Parliament may shut for a refurb and mouse purge. Other blackspots include Sunderland and Glasgow.
Here, a TV wildlife expert explains the mouse boom and what to do if your home is hit.
MICE populations go in a boom-and-bust cycle of around four years.
They breed like you wouldn’t believe because everything eats them — cats, foxes, owls, kestrels, stoats, badgers, weasels — so they must keep their numbers up.
The cycle eventually moves to the point where there are huge numbers. This boosts the numbers of animals of prey, too — they overeat the mice, the mice population falls, and so on.
Larry the Downing Street cat killed a wood mouse, not a house mouse. Humans have been pretty successful at wiping out the house mouse. I haven’t seen one for years.
Rodents are unable to vomit. So when we lay poison in our houses they are quickly killed. As long as they eat the poison, it is game over. Other species can reject food which is harmful to them. But not mice.
Wood mice are doing well in the UK and are found in both town and countryside. As long as there is some garden or outside space, they will be nearby.
Mouse trap ... Farringdon station
Mice like to eat insects and fruit, as well as human foods like biscuits. Their numbers are swelling because we’ve had a mild winter then wet spring and summer, which means food is plentiful. If you find a mouse in your house it’s almost certainly a wood mouse. They are more Disney-looking than their house counterpart — with huge, soft eyes and radar dish-like ears.
Wood mice can breed from the age of five weeks and they don’t hibernate, which makes them baby machines. They make babies all year round. They also live for only about a year in the wild, so they don’t waste time. We might be complaining about the mice population here in the UK but we don’t have the problems of places such as China and Australia.
These countries don’t have the same kind of predators to keep numbers down, so they get mice plagues.
There can be 3,000 per hectare sometimes and the ground becomes a moving sea of mice. It can turn people’s stomach to witness it. But it only lasts about two weeks because the mice die as quickly as they breed.
In those numbers they spread disease to each other, plus they are like humans in overcrowded situations — they don’t get on. So they stop breeding as much.
Within a fortnight the numbers will plummet from 3,000 to three.
But there are some great pictures out there of the mess they leave behind — mounds of mouse corpses as high as cars.
If you want to get rid of mice from your house it’s very simple — don’t give them any food.
They only hang around if there is something to eat.
So don’t leave biscuits in a cupboard, put them in a tin. Clean up and waste less food. Make sure you put any leftovers in a bin, not in a bag on the street.
Mice are not stupid so if there’s no food for them at yours they’ll move on to the next house.
Not your problem any more.
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