Every now and then I look through the old posts and drafts on the blog to see if there's anything I've missed or can delete. This time I found a post from pretty early in my time in NZ where I was struggling to come to terms with the role of possums as environmental villains. I know that regular reader Barratt likes the old posts so I thought I'd post this one, even if it is wildly out of date. Please enjoy Encounters With Possums.
New Zealand's worst introduced species is possums. They do more damage here than goats, stoats, deer, rabbits or anything else (except for people, but let's not think about that). There are estimated to be over 70 million of them in New Zealand, and given that NZ is pretty small, fitting this number of possums onto the landmass requires them to stack up on top of each other into huge towers.
In Australia, possums are cute lovable rogues that live in garage doors, walk across the electricity wires at night, belch at each other in the wee hours and try to sneak off with your food at popular campsites. In New Zealand, possums are an entirely different proposition. They eat native birds, eggs and snails, plus their selective grazing on new growth on native trees destroys large areas of forests.
In New Zealand, it is your duty to kill possums wherever they are found (like rabbits in Australia). This is a bit confronting if you're used to possums living in your garage and sleeping in someone's old suitcase on a nearby shelf while you fix bikes or do uni work. However, I am, as always, desperate to blend in so my latest encounter with a possum was less chivalrous.
There is a small picnic area where the access road to Broken River ski field meets the highway. This is a popular spot for the very stingy members of the skiing community to camp or sleep in their cars before driving up the hill to go skiing for the day. And, since this campsite is nestled within the beech forest, it is full of possums.
While camping there recently I noticed a possum coming into the picnic shelter to steal my food and pick at my leftovers. By yelling at it and shining my torch in its eyes, I backed it into a corner. Seized by my grim duty as a temporary New Zealander, I figured I should club it to death with a nearby stick.
I'm not sure if you've ever tried to club anything to death in the corner of a picnic shelter, but it's a slightly awkward proposition. Usually, when clubbing something, one swings their club in a circular arc, building momentum that is imparted to the target upon impact. But, if you swing in an arc within a rectangular picnic shelter and you try to hit the corner, the walls obstruct the intented path of the club, and you don't strike cleanly. If I had thought about this in advance, I would have approached along one of the walls, which would have allowed a clean swing into the confined space in which the possum was hiding, but that would have reduced the psychological effect of having cornered the possum, which was encouraging it to keep still.
So, the result of all this is that I didn't really hit the possum very hard. Instead, I basically just prodded it with a stick. And I've hit possums before - you have to hit them pretty hard before they take notice and stop chewing holes in your tent. In Australia, if you hit a possum (which is illegal, and I've only done it to stop them from chewing through my stuff to take my food or biting my feet - both of which have happened, and the biting on the foot thing was completely unprovoked), they usually look suprised (because they're protected and people don't usually hit them), and then keep doing whatever they were doing until you start whacking them with a water bottle or something. In New Zealand, when you hit a possum, it tries to kill you.
Of course, this was my first time hitting a possun in NZ, so I wasn't yet aware of this significant behavioural difference. To my considerable suprise, this possum responded to being prodded by lauching itself straight towards my face. In flight, it extended all four feet directly in front of it and reached its pointy claws for my delicate and handsome visage, in a fashion not dissimilar to those face hugging aliens from the Alien films. Fortunately, I was able to recover from the shock of this turn of events and, drawing from my years playing baseball with the Woden Valley Dodgers as a child, managed to club it out of the sky before it made contact.
The possum hit the ground and scurried for the doorway of the picnic shelter. I took an almighty swing at it as it reached the exit, terrified that it would come back with its friends and get even. Luck, however, went the way of the possum as the stick I swung clipped the frame of the entrance and snapped just before striking what has hopefully going to be a killing blow, but probably would have just made the possum mad enough to stand up on its hind legs and tear me apart. The possum ran off into the bush and I was left holding my broken club and thinking about what might have been.
In the end, I'm happy that things worked out the way they did. I can save face with the locals by claiming that I did my best to kill a dastardly possum, and I can save face with the possum in my garage back home by not having to think about how I disposed of the corpse of one of it's bretheren. Of course, my manhood is somewhat dimished by having been defeated in single combat by a small marsupial, but that's a small price to pay.
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