I Hate Meces to Pieces
Or whatever that cartoon cat said about those two little mice.
Was watching BBC news last night and apparently some remote island which is home to nesting and breeding sea birds has a mouse problem. Well the island is not inhabited that much by humans if at all IIRC, but the humans and ships which did land there in the past brought along mice.
Each year the sea birds return to this island to breed and rear their young, and it is the young baby birds the mice are eating *ALIVE*. Apparently the mice simply come upon a nesting baby bird and simply start feeding upon it, eating away it's internal organs. The news program showed this (night vison cameras) and it quite put me off dinner. Oh yes, the mice existing on this high protien diet have over the generations grown to three times the size of the common house mice they are descended from (BBC also showed this, and yes the damn things are *HUGE*. Imagine mice the size of small rats. Small,fat rats that is.
The high protein diet these mice live on also means they have quite allot of fat reserves and survive the winter quite well when they would normally die of cold and lack of food (nesting birds do not over winter on the island).
Long story short unless something is done soon, the birds will die out as over 90% of the baby birds are being eaten alive by the varmits. Apparently there is a way of dealing with this problem sucessfuly; it envolves air lifting massive amounts of mouse poison and is quite expensive, but has worked with similar situations on other islands.
So when head for that secluded island holiday, check you accomodations for mice. If they are waiting with little bibs and knives and forks at the ready, run fast and run far!
