It was in 1924 that the Bureau of Biological Survey, precursor to the US Fish and Wildlife Agency, responded to a request from local sheep farmers in Kern County, California and set out to eliminate coyotes and other predators from the area. The campaign, which sounded like a much better idea in 1924 than it does a century later, was a success, but it came at a cost.

According to the West Kern Oil Museum, the cost was the most epic house mouse infestation in US history. To be fair to the Bureau, Harvard mouse researchers have since drawn the conclusion that it might not have been entirely their fault. It turns out that a few dry years plus a dry lake bed planted with wheat, barley, corn, and cotton plus one of the most wildly successful invasive pest species in the world plus a torrential rain equals 100 million mice. 

Admittedly the number might have been a little smaller if there’d still been a few coyotes skulking about, but once you reach a million or so mice, I’m not sure it’s worth quibbling over the thousands a healthy coyote population might consume.

Oil companies close to the source of the outbreak did attempt to control the problem, digging long trenches filled with poison-laced grain, but it wasn’t long before the horde, fleeing their now flooded lake bed home, made their way to the nearby town of Taft, where residents set as many traps as they could and the house cats ate to bursting. But it was no good. They were at war. And they were losing.

I can sympathize, because as I mentioned in my last post, we recently bought some land in the country with a house that needs a little work. The house sat on the market for about a year before we found it, and the previous owners had long since moved out. We weren’t ready to move in just yet, as our son was finishing his senior year in high school and I was working in our current town. That was fine for us, because we had quite a few renovation ideas anyway and that gave us time to work on them. 

But what that means is that now for at least a year-and a-half, the house has been unoccupied except for the occasional night between shifts when my husband might sleep there or when we might stay a night or two working on projects. 

The mice have moved in. We are at war. And at the moment, it feels like we’re losing. 

Each time I’m at the house now, I set traps and catch a few. Yes, we do have a contract with a pest control company that has treated the home for insect infestations, eliminating our previously significant wasp problem, set up a termite monitoring system, and provided us with a rodent-fighting defense system, but I think we must have had a pretty good population of the little critters living, and unfortunately also dying and stinking, in our walls already. 

At this point, I’m ready to call in the Pied Piper.

That is what the people of Kern County did. Once again they appealed to the Bureau of Biological Survey, which in January of 1927, sent in an agent named Stanley Piper, because if you happen to have a Piper on staff in that situation, I don’t think you really have any choice. 

Piper pulled out the big guns and got to work poisoning the mice, though he also just kind of got lucky, because environmental conditions shifted, as they do, predatory birds moved back into the area, probably drawn by the horrendous smell of a great deal of prey, and the house mouse population soon fell to tolerable levels.

I’m hoping that will be our experience, too. I’m hoping that once we are in the house on a more regular basis, setting traps and making noise with our scary predator-smelling dog in tow, maybe we’ll win a few battles, and eventually the war.

I’m fairly certain we do at least have plenty of coyotes.