Stop The Possums!

Last month Bill from Bill's Ponderings who lives in Brisbane posted on yet another case of fried possum and an electricity outage as a result.  Apparently the possums climb up the power poles onto the lines and short them.  They will do that with monotonous regularity if they are not prevented.  In New Zealand when I first came I couldn't understand why every - and I mean every - pole had an aluminium or alloy sleeve.  It is to make it impossible for possums to climb them.  It's such a simple thing but 100% effective.

A band of possum preventers.  A band.  Gedit?

Simple but effective

It Depends Where You Are

how you regard the possum/opossum.  Here in New Zealand they are regarded as the scourge of our forestry industry and a major problem for indigenous flora and fauna.   There is even a museum dedicated to their extermination.  However in Australia they are almost worshipped as a national icon. Possums are nocturnal so one rarely sees them despite the millions of them that there are all around us.  I've never seen one at The Cottage although we know that they are here.  So when Mo and I were walking through the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney and I saw this female with a joey (which is the name for the young of any marsupial) my camera didn't even have to be switched on and I caught her before she made her way quickly to the top of the tree.

Don't Climb Poles

Every electricity or telephone pole in New Zealand has a metal collar around it to stop Possums climbing up and damaging the wires.

Opossum Trap

You may recall (but then again you may not) that in last visit's blog I wrote about a most unusual museum dedicated to the extermination of the Opossum from New Zealand.

The Opossum (generally called 'possums' here), however furry and cuddly it may look, is a major and serious pest in the Country and a major ecological nightmare.

Yesterday's gadget is a possum killer. Called a Timms trap, it kills possums quickly using a spring loaded metal mouth which snaps down on the neck of the animal breaking the neck or windpipe resulting in a rapid death. Timms traps need to be baited with fresh fruit such as an apple, orange or carrot to entice the possum to stick its head through the key hole. Marcel came nearest with a Wombat Trap except that the Wombat is a native of Oz which has not managed to procreate over here.

What Is It?

Designed in New Zealand. Made in New Zealand. Used in New Zealand.

Opossum World: A Most Unusual Museum

An Unusual Museum

Australian Bush-tailed Opossum

Most museums are devoted to informing people of things to be remembered or conserved. Opossum World in Napier is probably the only Museum in the world currently devoted to the extermination of a living creature: in this case the Opossum.

Its slogan is: Save a New Zealand tree. Buy Opossum fur products.

The imported Australian Opossum which is estimated to number 70 million in New Zealand eats an estimated 21 tonnes of foliage (mainly the young branch shoots of trees) each night - New Zealand's ecological nightmare.

The Australian Opossum or phalanger (Trichosurus vulpecula) was first liberated at Riverton, Southland, in 1858 with the idea of starting a skin trade. Since then innumerable recorded and unrecorded liberations have been made all over New Zealand, in Stewart Island and the Chatham Islands and in the outlying islands. There are now few areas without opossums, exceptions being the high country and northern Northland. There were at first very few complaints, but as opossums became established and increased in numbers and distribution they came to cause trouble, especially when combined with other animals, in native and man-made forests, in orchards and gardens, and in catchment areas. Admittedly hundreds of thousands of skins were exported each year, but on balance it appears that the harmful effect of opossums outweighed the profits from the sale of skins.

Legislation on the management and control of opossums reflects the changing attitude towards this species. A period of absolute protection from the date of introduction till 1920 was followed by a period of limited protection, when skins were taken by licence during a short open season. In 1947 all protection was removed and in 1951 a bounty system was introduced. This was followed in 1956 by further legislation which declared the opossum a “noxious animal”. At present the bounty system has been discontinued and opossum control is entrusted in part to rabbit boards [the mind boggles!] and in part to the New Zealand Forest Service. Trapping, used almost exclusively in the past, has recently been largely replaced by poisoning with 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate), or cyanide, and by shooting.