Ferrets and pellets

It’s not only New York City that seems to be infested with rats. In Brussels, Belgium, the same pests prompted the city council to form a task force to deal with rodents.

One solution being considered by the task force is to hire a professional rat catcher who would use trained ferrets to hunt out the animals and chase them toward traps, the BBC reported.

“Since the rat is a natural prey for the ferret, the ferret is able to drive the rats out of their hiding places and bring them closer to traps,” a spokesperson for Anas Ben Adelmoumen, the councillor in charge of public cleanliness, said.

Meanwhile, the mouse population on Marion Island, a small island off the southern coast of South Africa, threatens to decimate the seabirds living there.

Mice are not only eating bird eggs but also the seabirds themselves, Earth.com reported, citing Mark Anderson, CEO of nonprofit BirdLife South Africa.

“Mice just climb onto them and slowly eat them until they succumb,” Anderson said, according to Earth.com.

Nineteen of 29 bird species living on Marion, which is administered by South Africa, are already facing local extinction, so the Mouse-Free Marion Project was launched to exterminate the island’s mice all at once and leave the rodents with no chance of recovering.

Under the project, supported by conservationists, helicopters will drop 600 tons of rodenticide-laced cereal pellets to poison the mice. Officials are raising the $29 million needed to implement the project in 2027.