Mouse Monograph

Only ten States (in the Southeast) are comparatively free from mice. In the other 38 States, 1,000 mice allowed to run on the 65 million acres of hay raised per year would chew up 30 million dollars worth of hay. They kill trees, chew up gardens, nibble at stored grain. It is estimated that Connecticut has lost $500,000 in fruit crops during years when mice were plentiful. Sick mice infect pigs with erysipelas; pigs pass it on to humans.

Mice do most damage in "mouse years" when the mouse population exceeds the normal. Naturalists have noticed that the increase generally comes every eleven years, coincides with the sunspot cycle. They have suggested that the mildness of minimum sunspot winters is an important cause. Two famed mouse plagues have occurred in the U. S. One was in Humboldt Valley, Nev., in 1906-07. At the height of the plague there were from 8,000 to 12,000 mice per acre on large ranches. In 1926 an army of house mice marched out of the Buena Vista lake basin maize fields. Meadow mice joined them. Hundreds of thousands swarmed over the country, devastated 100 sq. mi. (TIUME, Jan. 31, 1927).

"One could almost count on one's fingers and toes the people on this earth who have printed anything in defence of voles [meadow mice]; and yet in fair review there seems to more to be said for them than against them," wrote Robert Torrens Hatt, mammalogist of the American Museum of Natural History, in a monograph on meadow mice, The Biology of the Voles of New York, published in the current bulletin of the Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station, Syracuse, N. Y. Mouse Man Hatt's brief for mice: They till the soil with their burrowings, are especially helpful in wet lowlands when their tunnels act as drains. Like the earthworm they bring subsoil to the surface, carry vegetable matter underground to enrich the soil. Excreta and dead mice are good fertilizers. the mouse furnishes carnivorous animals with a handy dinner. If the mouse supply were depleted, birds of prey, predatory mammals and reptiles would be forced to resort to other animals, might invade the farmers' stock yards more than they do now. Mice are over plentiful now because their natural enemies (snakes, herons, hawks, owls, foxes, weasels, skunks, shrews, turtles, bullfrogs) have been killed off. Mammalogist Hatt declared that the best way to control the U. S. mouse supply is to protect their natural enemies.

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