Playing Possum

On a bit of a slow news day in Oz, I thought I might take a moment to recount our adventures with our resident possum. He was holed up in the roof of our house for the first month of our occupancy - that is, he "was" until very recently...

On the first night we arrived in Melbourne, our landlord casually mentioned the fact that we might hear some scratching or hissing on the roof over the course of the night. It was, as she explained, a possum or possums, who lived in the area and they were known to use our roof as a bit of a freeway. Fine, we thought. Cool, in fact. Not only were we in Australia, doing the Australia thing, but we were officially living beneath some real Australian wildlife. Unfortunately, we didn't realize just how intimately close that wildlife was going to be.

Now I consider myself to be a bit of a nature boy and like a good encounter with the flora and the fauna as much as the next guy. Our numerous trips to the incredible Melbourne Zoo are testament to the fact that the entire family likes to get out and rub shoulders with the four-legged set. However, over the course of the first 3-4 weeks of life in our new digs it became somewhat painfully and loudly obvious that the resident "upstairs", not running on but actually living in our ceiling, might have to go. Picture a quaint family dinner interrupted suddenly by what sounded like 3-4 bowling balls bouncing noisily overhead. Or lying in bed in the middle of the night and listening to screams and hisses of angry (or perhaps mating) possums mere feet from your pillow. Perhaps the kicker was one night when we all heard the telltale hissing of our furry friend near the hatchway into the ceiling and then recoiled in horror as the drip, drip, drip of possum pee landed on a the faux-leather recliner. Well, that was the deal breaker between Mr. Possum and us - one of us had to go - and unfortunately we liked the location too much for it to be us!

The small complication in the subsequent possum exorcism that we were intent in embarking upon was that you are not allowed to kill possums (not that the thought had EVER crossed our minds) nor are you allowed to move them more than 100m from the place that you might like to remove them from. So while you may get them out of your ceiling for a week or a month, you never really get the satisfaction of knowing they are long gone. It would be like removing a raccoon from living under your deck but suggesting that he might find a more suitable place to live under your neighbour's all the while assuming that they would NEVER return to live back under yours. I applaud Australia for this highly conservationist approach to managing their wildlife. It means there are not a lot of suspicious possum disappearances at the hands of a lot of amateur pest controllers in the middle of the night. I'm not sure it does anything to control the population - but then again, in this island country there is a real concern for introducing anything new or reducing the numbers of anything that already exists- pest or not.

Anyway, into our lives walked Peter the Possum guy (I kid you not) who, with the help of some apple, a one way door, and a little mesh, managed to coax our little friend to get out and hopefully stay out. For a brief and fleeting moment, there was a small tinge of guilt as we cast our flatmate out into the cold, but that soon abated when we learned that he may have as many as 7-8 girlfriends in the area and that he could always shack up with one of them.

So now our ceiling is quiet, there is less possum poo on our back patio, the kids sleep a little more soundly (okay - mom and dad do, too) and we have survived our first close encounter with Aussie wildlife. In next week's instalment, I will write about Running with the 'Roos and How Not to Dis a Dingo.