POSSUM
OH boy here in little "peaceful" ol NZ, people's eyes go grey at the mention of that word. They are the arch enemy here. We have a possum fur trade here...
They were brought in by the early settlers for their fur. Their population soon exploded however...no predation.
With that population explosion the indigenous trees started to suffer. They feed on the new growth tips and that kills the trees. Beautiful trees hundreds of years old have dissapeared and its a continued fight to try and save what is left. People in neighborhoods even trap them as they are everywhere around here. One stopped me in my tracks (scared the hell out of the dog) one dark night when I first heard its unearthly sound.
Yeah I don't blame the possum (beautiful creature), but I LOVE and treasure trees more.
Theyre protected here, if one becomes an issue, say gets into your roof, you have to remove and release within 50m of where you find them as theyre not nomadic.
I used to live in a cabin on the side of a hill in West Bowral, and can confirm that they do strip trees bare of new shoots, especially in the lead up to winter. We had a particularly harsh winter one year, and so i supplemented their diet (which was non existent as theyd stripped the trees bare weeks earlier) with parrot mix and bananas and fruit.
I would leave out food under the trees, careful to not treat them as pets, though they often came up onto the cabin deck and roof at night - when i was inside and in bed. But at the end of winter, i was out on the deck having a cigarette one night, when one possum climbed the stairs and approached me, with a baby on her back. I like to think she was showing me the baby to say thank you for feeding her through the winter. Possum breed at any time during the year. One of many facts i learned about them over that winter. When the property was sold months later and i had to move, i left a laminated care card behind, about how to look after them
I miss the place in some ways, the wildlife, bunnies on the lawn in the morning, possums at night. but not the fact it was totally uninsulated and its in the southern highlands where winters hit the minuses...so i spent a lot of time in bed to stay warm that winter
I still love travelling down during the winter and getting off the train from sydney and the full blast of winter hitting me i the face, and usually most years im housesitting for one of my friends down there as they go off to europe to escape the weather i love, so it works out well. Most years, not this one...
We often get wind storms down there too that knockout the power quite often, one year the power and gas was out for 2 weeks and it was back to frontier type survival, heating everything on the wood burning stove and mostly freezing. I could do that full time.
Definitely not
@Doffy territory.....
