Ruud Kleinpaste: Possums - weird damage patterns and awful noises

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

Damage in the garden can strike at any time.

Serious leaf damage (chewing and molesting of foliage all the way down the branches of a tree or shrub) is not something that small birds tend to do.

At ground level you can rightly guess that sparrows and quail are the possible delinquents, but when it really looks like full-on destruction you will need to do a bit of research:

Large bites in leaves: classic possum damage! Skeletonised Pohutukawa was bringing the trees to extinction – Project Crimson was the organisation that started the rescue mission.

Possums work on their local, favourite tree in the neighbourhood – constant chewing puts trees under pressure to make more leaves, often with an increased amount of sugar – Yum!

Bark damage is easy to spot: big scratches up and down the tree. Possum poo (1-1.5 cm in length) is often found under the tree – a dead give-away!

But the most ridiculous damage in your garden is possum chewing on fruit, especially citrus. It’s often like the possum helps you to peel the fruit – it only seems to like that peel and doesn’t often touch the fruit, unless it is very sweet and ripe.

Possums are rather destructive eaters. They eat a decent number of different trees – their favourites are Pohutukawa, Totara, Kohekohe, and Tawa, and their feeding habits literally have an impact on the make-up of our forests.

That means that our forests are often changed in composition, which in turn could have an impact on the sequestering of carbon.

All possums in New Zealand together eat about 21,000 tonnes of vegetable material – almost equivalent to the weight of the Sky tower! They also eat birds, and the eggs in their nest, and many larger insect species.

At night, possums roam their territory. They are not always easy to find, as they are rather sneaky when going from tree to garden. We used to have them in the city of Auckland and many people simply didn’t believe they would have them in densely populated areas.

But even on quiet nights, possums can be heard making their special noises: growling, hissing, and screeching.

Possum control is best attempted with the good old “Possum Trap”, also known as the Timms Trap.

There are also the newer models of re-setting traps.

Cam Speedy is a brilliant trapper and his best lure for possums is the following mixture:

Make a “blaze” with flour (1 kg) and icing sugar (100 gr), plus 15 ml of cinnamon, peach, eucalyptus, or vanilla essence.

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