Science: Millions & Millions of Mice

One morning an Australian rancher swept 28,000 poisoned mice off his veranda. In a neighboring village 544 tons of mice were killed in five months. Hordes of field mice—as many as 80,000 per acre—once appeared in southern California, disappeared after devastating the countryside. In pre-Nazi Norway a steamer ploughed for a quarter of an hour through shoals of mouselike lemmings swimming out to sea via the Trondheim Fjord. In France great plagues of voles (short-tailed field mice) appear approximately every five years, then abruptly disappear. One of Germany's periodic infestations of mice and...