Dubbo (Australia) (AFP)

After years of drought, farmers in eastern Australia have for months faced a plague of mice devouring their crops.

Equipped with a broom, Col Tink, a farmer near Dubbo, a small remote town in New South Wales, chases hundreds of mice to a large vat in which they drown.

This method is the only one he has to curb this scourge which strikes many farms in the east of the immense island-continent.

But so far his efforts have been in vain.

Mice continue to eat away at its grain and hay reserves, and they do not fail to prey on any edible product.

On nightmarish videos that have toured the world, thousands of mice swarm in barns, homes and move in hordes at high speed.

It is the latest calamity to hit Australian farmers, after years of drought, months of devastating forest fires in late 2019 and subsequent flooding.

"My dad is still alive, he's 93, and it's the worst three years of his life. I think it's probably the worst mouse invasion on record," said Cattleman Tink.

He fears that this scourge will last during the southern winter, which begins in June.

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"If we don't have a really cold and wet winter, I'm a little worried about what will happen in the spring," the 65-year-old told AFP.

Steve Henry, a researcher at CSIRO, the public scientific research center, is hardly more optimistic.

"When such an invasion of mice ends, they disappear overnight and that is not what we are seeing now," says Henry, a pest specialist for nearly three decades.

Mice landed in Australia with the first British settlers.

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This tiny rodent adapts perfectly to the good and bad performance of Australian agriculture, linked to the climate.

This scourge is therefore frequent, but this year it has reached new heights.

- "A dangerous slope" -

This year the numbers are "simply astronomical," according to Terry Fishpool, 74, a grain farmer from Tottenham, NSW.

Large numbers of rodents were reported as early as October and a bumper harvest, after the worst drought on record, allowed them to proliferate.

Bill Bateman, associate professor at Curtin University in Western Australia, estimates that so far these mouse invasions have only happened once a decade, but climate change may make it more common.

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"If we don't have harsh winters anymore, the mice will have enough to survive all year round, so it's going to become chronic," says Bateman.

Faced with this scourge, the Australian government has announced a multi-million dollar aid plan and developed a powerful pesticide, bromadiolone, which has yet to be approved by authorities.

But this anti-coagulant, which acts more quickly and efficiently than pesticides hitherto widespread, has the disadvantage of staying longer in the body of dead or dying mice.

Experts therefore fear that it will also kill the animals which will then eat the poisoned mice.

"The use of this second generation rodent control product is extremely worrying," said Bateman of the School of Molecular and Life Sciences.

"It is a dangerous slope" and its long term use and stay in the environment.

By killing natural predators, it could poison humans through the food chain, he said.

"We are really going to get ourselves into trouble in the future, not only by destroying our biodiversity, but also by destroying our defenses against any future mouse invasion."

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According to Henry, the use of insecticides, traps and methods previously used could help reduce the number of mice if their populations continue to increase after winter.

For him the priority is therefore to seek long-term solutions, including the causes of this "huge" scourge.

© 2021 AFP