I live in a house in the lower end of Strickland Avenue, South Hobart. It is within sniffing distance of the Cascade Brewery. It is surrounded by lush vegetation, and has an elevation roughly equal to the top of the concrete silos of the brewery complex.
We have been hearing scrabbling noises in the roof for many months now, and possibly more than a year. We always thought it was mice, or rats. It has been nearly two years since the last of the dogs passed on, a German shepherd who lived to the age of 16. Nothing was game to enter the yard when he was around, and certainly nothing when his mad mate, a female whippet/staffy cross, was around, although she departed a year or two earlier.
The house has a near flat skillion roof, and the rear is cut back into the sloping back yard, sufficiently enough for an energetic young person to be able to leap on and off the roof, not that this description now fits me. There is vegetation close to the rear of the roof, and ornamental fruit trees sufficiently close to the front of the house for possums to climb off the roof, and straight onto them.
We can here them of a night, running across the roof, and we can hear them in the trees. We did not associate them with the noises we could hear in the ceiling, and we have had evidence of mice, or more probably, rats, occasionally in the house.
In recent months, there has been the sound of fighting in the ceiling space. Do rats really make that much noise? Then the ceiling fan in the spa room came crashing down. It was getting a bit much. Instead of replacing the fan, we took it away, and used the opportunity to put some rat traps in the roof space, attached to lengths of string. We never caught anything, but the traps were occasionally sprung, and sometimes pushed over the hole, and were found hanging by the string. Amazing bloody rats! Then one night, I happened to hear some noise, and in the darkness, snuck into position below the hole where the ceiling fan used to be. I looked up in time to see a creature traverse the 300 mm hole, heading in a north westerly direction. Holy shit! If that is the size of the rats, I’m out of here!
A little later, I heard the sound of a possum on the roof, the unmistakeable sound of their bounding gait. I snuck outside, and up the sloping back yard, where a good view of the roof surface could be had. To my amazement, I saw a possum approach the standing vent which sits above where the fan is positioned, and standing on its back legs, put its head under the chinaman’s hat lid on the vent, and disappear inside. Possums! No wonder it looked big for a rat!
An amazing comedy of events has occurred in the last few weeks since discovering the rats were really possums. A search of the net revealed some useful information. Possums are territorial, and most problems occur when young males, (yes, it has to be young males!), reach the stage when they have to find themselves their own territory. Most road kills are young males. Websites recommend that removing possums and dumping them in strange territory usually results in their death. A good solution, they recommend, is to build a possum box, and secure it at least four metres off the ground, close to their favourite trees. This we did. I built a structure dubbed the possum Hilton, comprising three compartments, and a roofed veranda providing shade over the separate entrances. We then wrapped some stainless steel mesh around the roof vent, securing it with pop rivets.
Success, or so we thought! Several days later we heard scrabbling noises in the roof! Shit! We had trapped a possum on the inside. We then rigged an elaborate system of platforms, and a ladder underneath the ceiling hole where the fan had yet to be replaced. Some sultanas were placed on the top side of the ceiling, through the hole. They were disappearing at regular intervals. Meanwhile, other possums could be heard during the night, giving the vent a good shake from on top of the roof.
In a stroke of genius, we sprinkled flour on the concrete floor in the back room, and left the back door open for the early part of the evening, while keeping all other internal doors closed. I inspected the scene at about midnight, and found a single line of tracks leading from the base of the ladder, through the flour, across the back room, and out the back door. Bloody ripper! I shut the back door, and reproached myself for thinking of the words “mission accomplished” and the image of George W Bush. A few nights earlier another possum had managed to scramble onto the kitchen window ledge, and climb in through the open window, but freaked out when it scattered all the washed dishes, pots and pans on the sink, which rudely woke the household. It managed to exit through the window before the first to the kitchen switched the lights on. At least this indicated the mesh on the vent had sealed the only other entry point, or so we thought!
A couple of nights later, with fresh flour to capture the evidence, we closed the back door at around midnight, with no exiting footprints visible. Maybe this time the house was secure, and the ceiling space vacated. However, come morning, there was a fresh trail of prints leading inwards towards the ladder, and the redundant dog entrance through the back door had been pushed in!
Now let me explain: the dog door was created by removing two panes of glass in the multi-pane door, and inserting a new mullion to create a hole sufficient for a German shepherd pass through, over which a curtain used to drape. However, since the departure of the dog, a temporary patch was achieved by cutting down an old core-flute election poster featuring Duncan Kerr, which must date from about 2001, or so, and securing it in the hole with a few skew-nailed brads.
I am sorry Duncan, I have voted for you on every occasion you have been a candidate, and I am not meaning to suggest you are soft on border security, and I know you have done a lot for genuine refugees, but when it comes to a home invasion in South Hobart, your poster couldn’t keep the possums out!
