Hidden beneath the fertile soil of a sprawling farming region in Australia’s west is a destructive threat that’s unnerving locals.
Farmer Belinda Eastough told Yahoo News the ground feels strangely soft as she walks the paddocks of her Geraldton property, 370km north of Perth.
Underground is a network of burrows containing millions of mice, which sleep during the day and then feast on crops at night while farmers are sleeping.
“They played football up at Northampton on Saturday, and the ground was all squelchy because the mice have burrowed down into the oval,” she said.
“At night, apparently, they all pop up like meerkats.”
While there’s a lightness to her description of the mouse plague in Western Australia, beneath her tough exterior, she’s holding back a measure of stress and deep frustration.
Not only are farmers fighting a war on invasive rodents, the weather outlook for next season is also bad, and fuel and fertiliser prices have soared because of the war in Iran.
Estimates suggest there are over 4,000 mice and burrows per hectare, in places like Northampton, north of Geraldton, and between Albany and Esperance.
When the mouse plague began early in 2026, they also entered homes, causing severe mental stress.
Eastough is allowing two feral cats to live in her roof cavity, because they’re doing a “mighty fine job” of scaring the mice away.
In videos of the Geraldton region below, a carpet of mice scurries under grain silos, freaking out those behind the camera.
In one, a person can be heard squealing, “I’m actually speechless”, while in another, someone stutters, “This is too much”.
Mice scurry from paddocks and into homes
The situation sounds like something out of a Hollywood horror movie, but it is having a very real impact on the lives and finances of farmers.
The 2020/2021 mouse plague in NSW cost the economy upwards of a $1 billion and caused severe stress.
Eastough works as an agronomist and has seen the problems mice are causing at multiple sites around the region.
“I had a client who came back the next day after seeding, and the mice had eaten out the corners of his paddock overnight,” she said.
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The rule of thumb is to bait when there are two burrows per hundred metre transect, but she’s seeing around 20, and in some cases up to 50.
A field in the Geraldton region is pockmarked with mouse burrows.
(Supplied)
It’s the worst Eastough has seen mice in the paddocks over three decades on her property.
She and other farmers are baiting as they seed, to try and lessen the damage caused by the rodents.
To reduce the likelihood of killing owls, eagles and tawny frogmouths that are feasting on the mice, farmers are using the first-generation poison, zinc phosphide.
Stomach-churning description of driving through mouse plague
Steve Henry is a research officer specialising in mice at Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO.
He’s seen the devastation firsthand, not only in Western Australia, and has heard stories from shocked locals as he’s travelled.
“A truckie described driving between Albany and Esperance as like driving on rice bubbles,” he told Yahoo News.
When he drove across South Australia, mouse numbers were bad but not as high as in Western Australia.
But high enough to catch multiple mice in a single trap.
Henry is urging farmers to bait ahead of winter to help keep numbers down.
“Mice stop breeding over winter, and they just go into survival mode,” he said.
“So if you get a low level of winter survival, when they start breeding in the spring, they start from a lower population base.
“Therefore, it takes them longer to build numbers where they cause damage.”
Worryingly, both he and Eastough have documented examples of mice continuing to breed in the lead-up to winter in both states, likely due to the availability of food caused by unexpected rain.
Perfect storm that triggered mouse plague
Multiple factors are causing the mouse plague in Western Australia.
Henry believes the first change that favoured the mice was the adoption of the no-till farming movement decades ago, a regenerative type of cropping that doesn’t disturb the soil with ploughing.
“We get lots of food left behind in these systems, and it doesn’t take very much food to sustain a lot of mice,” he said.
“So 150kg of background food per-hectare equates to 50,000 mouse days of food.
“Another way of spinning that is 150 kilos effectively supports 1000 mice per hectare through 50 days of summer.”
Both he and Eastough agree that a more recent driver of the plague was the sudden destocking of sheep from paddocks.
Truck drivers and shearers all left the state after the federal government signalled it would ban the live export of sheep due to animal welfare concerns.
Farmers quickly adapted by sowing crops in their fields, dramatically increasing the availability of feed.
At the same time, the region also experienced regular summer rain, supporting millions of thirsty mice and the plants they eat.
Single event that’s worse than a mouse plague
While things are tough right now for farmers, Eastough concedes the situation isn’t as bad as crippling droughts.
When there’s no rain, crops die, animals waste away as food isn’t available, and there’s nothing farmers can do but watch on.
During mouse plagues, farmers have to be active in baiting and protecting their crops.
“I guess I’m living the dream,” Eastough said.
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