Saturday 7 May 2016

Update 7th May 2016

There have been no major changes here for a while; Sasha, Farley, Toto and Flynn are still around. Ruby has been seen a few times and once brought Maple to the house. On another occasion, Maple and Clover visited together. Maple is a little girl possum.

Maple - 13th April 2016 [Photo by Xesce]


Clover is more shy than Maple and was difficult to photograph. Clover has a dark spot on the white tip of his/her tail which resembles a ringtail named Rosebud who was Wasabi's older brother and therefore would be Maple and Clover's uncle.

Clover - 13th April 2016 [Photo by Xesce]

Flynn now no longer shares a sleeping place with Sasha and, going by past experience (not always a reliable guide with possums), he might be run out of the neighbourhood some time in the next month or two.

Flynn on Box 7 - 8th April 2016
He now sleeps further away from Sasha

One night he decided to sleep in the ceiling space. This seems to be a preferred location for the smaller possums because the larger ones can't fit in to get at them. Anyway, it turned out that Toto was also sleeping in this place.

They slept at opposite ends of the ceiling and tolerated each other during the day, but when it came time to leave in the evening a lengthy and noisy fight ensued.

There were possums running back and forth over the ceiling and shrieking for quite a while. I opened the trapdoor under the eaves in the hope that at least one of the possums would jump out. This was a bit of a mistake because Toto half fell out of the ceiling when I opened the door, pinching her tail underneath a supporting beam. I was able to free her tail fairly quickly (fortunately, I had put on some thick welding gloves prior to this in case I got in the way of an angry possum) and when she was next seen a few days later she was using her tail normally, so it seems there wasn't any harm done. After that, neither possum wanted to leave via the trapdoor, and I eventually closed it, with both possums leaving via the normal entrance some time later.

So the message seems to be that interfering in the affairs of possums can sometimes do more harm than good.

Flynn hiding nervously in a Frangipani - 14th April 2016 [Photo by Xesce]

Both Flynn and Toto have been very cautious when visiting the house; arriving quietly and not hanging around any longer than necessary. Presumably Sasha will chase them off if she spots them. Toto appears to be good at evading Sasha since she always appears healthy and has avoided the pluckings and scratching that young possums often seem to pick up.

Toto - 22nd April 2016 [Photo by Xesce]

Farley, however, got a quite serious plucking around the throat (only partly visible in the photo below). Fortunately, it seems that only the fur was pulled out and there was no damage to the skin and no infection.

Farley - 19th April 2016 [Photo by Xesce]

Farley being silly - 19th April 2016 [Photo by Xesce]
Sasha is still the Queen Possum and sleeps in the choice accommodation - Box 7 - most days.

Sasha - 26th April 2016

Finally, here's a photo of Ruby. She was not intimidated by Sasha who was on the handrail at the same time.

 
Ruby - 22nd April 2016 [Photo by Xesce]

In other news, Telstra delivered a replacement cable modem a couple of weeks ago. The Possum TV server would have been briefly unavailable on a number of occasions since then while the modem was being installed and configured. The modem has also stopped working a few times, requiring a restart. I'm not sure whether this was something on the Telstra side or whether the modem itself has some problems - I suppose we'll see as time goes on. 

So if the Possum TV site goes down, this is probably the cause, and I'll rectify it as soon as I can.

There has also been a youngish brush turkey seen in the back yard recently. It looked roughly the right size to be one of the chicks grown up. Brush turkey chicks supposedly have a very high mortality rate, and with all of the cats and dogs and cars here in suburbia I had thought it would be unlikely that either of the two chicks I saw would have survived, but maybe we've been lucky.

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