How do they run so fast on such short legs? Actually, 'run' is not the word. It's not a matter of all four legs pumping in rhythm. Mice, when the mood or the necessity rules, go from A to B with a sort of flicker so that you're not sure if you actually saw anything at all.
Such was the movement I caught out of the corner of my eye on the back verandah as I bent to collect some kindling for the early morning fire. Soon, a second sighting moved me to deploy a hefty chunk of bait.
Checking this strategy a couple of hours later and expecting to see evidence of nibbling, I was astonished to find that the entire lump had been removed without trace. Either this mouse was, as the footy coaches say, a big unit or, more likely, some kind of rodent cooperation had managed the removal. The same teamwork, I hoped, was being employed in devouring the deadly prize.
My rather obsessive interest in the affairs of mus musculus — the common house mouse — is prompted not only by its rustlings, dartings and nibblings around the house but also and more spectacularly by the worst mouse plague in 20 years in South Australia's west.
I remember some time in the late 1980s heading to Streaky Bay on a fishing trip along roads slippery with crushed mice.
The mudflaps on the old Nissan Patrol were caked thick with skin, innards and blood and our traditional camping sites around Sceale Bay were 'alive' with thousands of mice: they trapezed in the branches of trees, cartwheeled and scrambled on the ground, congregated on and under rocks. They would run across your boots and hold conventions in any container, such as a tackle box, carelessly left open and accessible. And food, of course, needed Armaguard-like protection.
If our flailing arms, sudden movements and profanity ever scared them, they showed no sign of it. Shooting them with an air rifle was fair ground fun for a while, but the game palled when the targets leapt up on the barrel of the rifle and did their Band-of-Brothers imitation in and around the box of pellets till it tipped over. We retreated in disorder to the mouse-free zone of the Streaky Bay pub.
The present plague massing in the west is worse than that. Mice in their millions cover the paddocks and ravage any attempt to begin