Bago residents relive mystery rodent migration
July 26 - August 1, 2010
A resident of Wingabaw village points at a stand of dead bamboo. Pic: Sandar Lwin
AS swarmed of rats gushed out of the jungle and stormed through Bago and Daik-u townships last month, residents were filled with a mixture of disgust and excitement.
It was a rodent stampede on a scale that astounded even older residents of the affected villages and left behind ravaged fields, roads littered with rat corpses and stunned communities – who are still enthusiastically exchanging stories of the incident.
Along the Yangon-Nay Pyi Taw highway, in Wingabaw, Sitpinsate, Bawnatkyee and Bawni villages, snatches of conversation caught in tea shops and grocery stores earlier this month revealed a variety of reactions.
“They have their leader. A flock of 40 to 50 rats follow the head rat like ducklings,” recalled a boy living beside the highway near Sitpinsate village. His father added: “When I heard sounds like ‘wayaww yaw yaw’ and ‘shokeshoke shokeshoke’ in the fields around my house, I flashed the torch to see what was happening. It was about 9:30pm. The rats were making a mess of everything, both around my house and on the highway.”
At that time, the whole road was red with the dead bodies of rats, though the rain has now washed them away. They died because the cars ran over them and also the villagers beat them.”
A young boy from a fishing family living beside Bawni dam said the rats would cluster in the trees “like a cane ball”.
“When the rats in the trees saw a villager, they would cling onto each other,” he said.
Most people interviewed said they just watched on in amazement as the rats swarmed across their fields.
“The senior villagers can’t explain it. They haven’t ever experienced an incident like this,” said a man in a teashop in Bawni.
“Of course we were scared, we hadn’t seen anything like it before,” said a woman buying goods at a grocery story in Sitpinsate.
“I prayed for the nat spirits to save our fields. That’s why the rats did not stay in our fields for long. They moved to other places after two or three days,” said a woman in Wingabaw.
Most people in townships were left unperturbed by the scurry of rodents.
“The rats didn’t disturb us too much because mostly they didn’t enter the villages. They mainly went to the fields. Since they go out only at night, we couldn’t find them during the daytime, so the children were not startled either,” said a shopkeeper in Bawnatkyee.
But the question on almost every villager’s lips is simply: “Why did this happen?”
One possible answer may be found in bamboo flowers. The Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation last week issued a “rat control measure alert”, published in state-run media, warning of “the high reproductive rate of the rats relating to bamboo flowering and fruit shedding” in the early monsoon period.
“The subsequent food shortage problem of the hills can lead the rats which live in the hills to migrate to the lowlands where rice and other crop fields exist and eat the seeds and destroy the seedlings,” the notice said.
The notice did not say where the bamboo flowering was taking place but in areas of Bago township The Myanmar Times encountered evidence of dead bamboo. Flowering normally occurs at the end of the bamboo’s life cycle.
Some species of bamboo only flower after extensive periods of dormancy that can last up to 130 years – but when they do eventually flower, the rodent population surges.
