A Moving Carpet

"There are millions of them!" gasped a policeman in rural Ouyen, deep in Australia's richest grain and grazing country. "You can't drive at more than 20 miles an hour, because if you had to brake, you'd skid and turn over. There are that many of them on the road." Not only on the roads but in wheat paddocks, barns and pantries across huge stretches of Victoria and New South Wales, hordes of field mice now form what one farmer calls "a moving carpet." The rampaging rodents, product of a rare combination of a big wheat surplus and optimum ground temperatures for breeding, constitute the worst such plague in Australia since 1939.

In Ouyen, tin guards on the legs of hospital beds protect patients from the rodents, and wags joke that they now have the world's only 18,000-hole golf course. Some farmers, their fields chewed to stubble, have been forced to feed their sheep by hand. Set out in barnyards, baited, water-filled drums fill up with as many as 1,000 drowned mice a night. Yet so far not even Victoria's Vermin and Noxious Weeds Destruction Board has come up with a really effective solution. One woman whose supply of the Pill was eaten by mice only half jokingly proposed birth control as a long-range solution. Officials, however, were placing their faith in the first chill of the Australian winter--but that was still many weeks off.

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