Goomalling in West Aussie has the distinction of being named as place of possums, apparently in the Noongar language..but I’m told that there aren’t many of them left.
Certainly out in the wheatbelt they are few and far between. You get more pink-and-grey cockatoos, and the white Corellas..the latter have a fondness for pristine bowling greens, which excites the locals up no end. A good thwack with a four by two for example on the metal poles which hold the roofs up in a lot of the in-town houses serves to remind them that gunshots sound very similar, and skeddaddling is a good option..two library books thwacked together works well as well. Its all very effective, until there’s a squawk from those that didn’t hear the ..er..warning bell, whereby they settle back into trees surrounding the said bowling green, to await further developments. We had a little old gentleman in Beacon who made it his business to disturb said critters whenever they threatened to make holes in the carefully maintained bowling green. We had something really effective at getting every single Corella heading out of town flat out, heading sou sou west as I recall. Something went bang down the other end of Dunne st in town..but it wasn’t your ordinary loud bang..it was ginormous. All the town turned out, worried that it might have been a gas bottle..it turned out that the culprit had pumped up his wheelbarrow tyre, without the benefit of a pressure gauge. It did last five or ten minutes or so, before deciding to Let Go. Awesome! Did generate some discussion locally, to whit..we thought the darn things had pushed ..any of the leading lights of the Bowls Club.. too far this time, and we wondered what they’d gotten hold of, etc etc. Unfortunately the pesky things turned back up again, but it took a good week or so. And, unfortunately, it wasn’t a happening which could be employed numerous times..)
Them was the days.
Possums, ah yes. (The astute amongst you might have noticed the same possum pikky for part 1 and part 2..I’m here to say these ones are the Queensland/Alexandra Hills variety..
The lad arrives in Queensland, land of the larrikin voter with only one house of local parliament, unlike the rest of Australia which has two. The only effective opposition seems to be the Courier Mail newspaper, anti every government of whatever colour or flavour. Certainly gets its message across. Its cartoons are awesome.
I digress..possums.
The first place he loitered in was backed up to a creek/swamp, where there was plenty of hollow logs and nesting places for critters of all persuasions. These critters had perfected the art of looking hungry, at deaths door, scrawny, ribs poking out, that sort of thing, and the only thing to do was to feed them. There were possum boxes scattered around, and one or two designed for tweety birds…only small possums would have been able to get inside them. Honey never seemed to disappear so fast, as in that spot in Cleveland..one word..Lorikeets. A mob would descend sunday afternoons, regular as clockwork..until a few of them decided to up the ante, and turn up saturday..not instead of, but in addition to. And it went downhill from there, sadly. White bread, dollar a loaf stuff, plus honey mixed in was draped here and there..and we had fun. Chooks eventually got a handful as well, after looking particularly peckish, and longingly at these critters feeding a few inches above chook height..Seeing as the locals were extremely well fed, I had a momentary delusion that the possums would leave the vegy garden alone. Sigh! It wasn’t to be. Everything had to be encased in wire mesh..and what the possums couldn’t get at, it would appear the swamp rats did, judging by the size of the holes the blighters got into the passionfruit by.
So, here we are in Alex Hills.
Two above ground vegy gardens looked promising, but a suitable mesh covering was in the works, to keep the possums at bay..the mesh didn’t eventuate, aaand the vegeies were Left Alone. My goodness me! All sorts of possum tempting delights were on offer, and not one nibble. Well, ok, we had a line of silver beet seedlings disappear overnight, and the next lot still have wire mesh on top.. some Rather Large grasshoppers seem to be the Only Predators worth worrying about. Might have something to do with the spacing between the bars in the fence against the scrub..only little possums get through.