Our house guests...

Isn’t this little fella gorgeous? He’s a very rare golden possum and I found this article about him in a recent National Trust newsletter. Fortunately or unfortunately he isn’t the type of possum that has taken up residence at our house. Ours is a common brushtail. Luckily for us she, as it turns out, took up residence in our carport. Lucky because you really don’t want a possum living in your roof, rare or otherwise and because they are territorial it is very difficult to move them along.

We discovered she was a she when the one tail we could see hanging down from a drainpipe at the back of the carport suddenly became two tails, one much smaller. I’ve posted photos of the tail(s) but it’s hard to see what they belong to. Sometimes we’ve been lucky enough to see a claw hanging down too but tails and claws are usually retracted whenever we walk up to say hello.

As the little one is getting bigger we’ve seen them both out at night feeding off the buds and blossoms on the big trees in the garden next door. Sometimes the mum is carrying the bubs on her back and sometimes they are moving independently. Whilst I’m not that happy about having to clean up possum poop from my backyard, in some ways its quite nice having nature that close to us in such a dense urban environment. I’m not sure if they are here to stay permanently or whether as the little one grows up they will move on to someone else’s carport!