Lascelles, Victoria, Australia, has a population of 93. There were about the same number of residents in 1917, or at least human residents. But there were also an estimated 100 million mice! The mouse population boomed after an abnormally warm winter, and every nook and cranny of the small town was full of mice. The residents of Lascelles buried 40-gallon drums to trap the mice, until they had killed 1500 tons of mice. You can imagine what a horror that year was, because a rodent infestation is a tried-and-true horror film plot and gave us the Black Plague, too.
But the story of Lascelles is just one story. There was also the time 11 million birds decided to roost in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and that wasn't all that long ago. Or the dust storm that was so thick it brought the temperature down 30 degrees in just minutes in Dodge City, Kansas. Or the historical shower of rocks from the sky that killed 10,000 people in China (that wasn't a small town, but it was still bizarre). Or the Michigan town that was swallowed by sand dunes. Read what happened in all these disasters at Cracked.
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Reading of the birds and the attempts to kill them with shotguns reminds me, with sorrow, of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, once so prolific they changed forest ecosystems. Audubon described one time when it took three days for the mega-flock to fly by [The Birds of America, v5]: "The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose."
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