OMG! Possum Attack!
This is what happens when urban possums work out where your bins are. And we've only been in the new house two weeks!
We had possums at the old house, and we lived in harmony with them. The shyer ring-tailed possums would stick to the roof and our mango tree. The brush-tails (of which the lady above is a fine example) would sometimes come inside the house, have a fossick about and then get on with things. They assisted in our composting efforts by pinching any kitchen waste from the pile and leaving handy little pellets in the garden beds. In fact, it got to the point where we'd just drop veggie peelings and whatnot out the kitchen window into the garden bed below, making the peelings acessible without having to cross our large back yard on the ground. They didn't associate the humans with food and treated us with due caution, more or less. Everybody won! No rats in our compost! Free snacks for possums! Green lush garden in the middle of a drought!
These guys on the other hand are keen to show us who's territory the new house really is. There's a huge family group living somewhere very close, and our roof seems to be a major possum highway. The matriarch of the clan raids our kitchen daily. Short of closing all the windows and the back door all the time (unfeasable, since it's summer and there isn't any other ventilation), I think we're just going to have to learn to live with her.
The attractive blond there is The Man. He hollered at her, along with me and ikiller, for a good ten minutes. She ignored us and kept nibbling away. The Man eventually had to give her a good push to get her to shift, and even then she stayed on the top of the window there until we closed it. Total lack of fear in that one.
She's got a joey in the pouch, too:
The sizable bulge between her back legs probably has at least one baby curled up, listening in on her lessons regarding the use of opposable thumbs for opening windows, garbage bag ripping technique and the appropriate disaffected expression to use when confronted with three pyjama-clad maniacs. Here she is again, in the much more acceptable act of pinching pumpkin skins from the back garden bed. You can really make out where her the opening to her pouch is:
This smaller chappie here has earned himself the nickname of "Racoon" for his window-jimmying skills:
He's much daintier and probably a male, since the wall under that window is heavily marked. He's not quite as brazen as the matriarch, but that's kind of like saying Xerxes of Persia was not quite as brazen as Hannibal. He also pays us scant regard, but will bugger off once things get noisy. However, waving a pool queue at him will only make him lick the end of it. No pictures of that, I'm afraid, since I have but one pair of hands, but the expression was less "oh no! She's gunna poke me!" and more "So, you gunna tape some bread to that thing?" I think we can say with all saftey that the people living here before us used to hand feed them.
I don't think I'm going to bother with a compost bin at all. I'd just come home one day to find it devoid of scraps and full of nesting possums. And really when all is said and done, bin raids aside, I still think we can work for a common good:
See? Compost, in handy, easy-to-sweep-up pellet form. Isn't the Circle of Life a beautiful thing?
(Cross-posted to urban_nature)