The Possum Trip

Hello my friends, it's Alex again.

I'm taking the intiative and writing my own blog post. And this time it's without being threatened by Mum! Amazing huh? And I have nothing else to do on this dark rainy day. I have only been home for three days. For the past two weeks I have been in Southern Australia and Victoria, two of the Southern states below us, about a two hour plane trip. I was invited by a friend of a co-worker of dads to come down and help her with a college research trip she is conducting. She goes out into the Australian bush and traps Ringtail Possums! Being me, I accepted without any second thoughts and after a two hour plane ride, followed by a four hour car ride, I was at the site house. And it was a nice house, with a real bed, running water, electricity for fridge, stove, and microwave, and a working tv and DVD player. The TV and some books a friend loaned to me helped kill the spare time, which we had lots of. BUT! Duing the times that we were busy this is what we did. The woman who invited me down to work with her, now my good friend, is named Melanie. She is doing post Doctorite work for the University of Adeliade.

The first day we got down there we started to set up traps. Setting up a possum trap consists of finding a good spot with a good tree and putting the two and half meter ladder up against your selected tree, chaining the ladder to the tree with a, guess it, chain. Without that chain I would not have lasted very long on some of those thin trees. Once you do that you climb up the ladder wth a hammer and four nails, holding three of the nails in my mouth I would hammer one nail into the side of the tree. then I would put a trap bracket on the tree, and then using the rest of the nails, secure the bracket to the tree. Then you set the trap on the bracket, set it, and ten go and do the next trap. Al together it would take between five and ten minutes per trap. Now turn that into fifty traps and you've got what we were doing fo rth efirst three days. It would have only been the first two, but the place where we set up a patch of 18 traps was a bad spot so we took them all down the verynext day after we set them up and then we set them up at another patch.

So once all the traps are set up the job became easy. Every morning we would wake up at 6:30 (which became 5:30 on the third day, due to daylight savings) and go out in the Ute (Australian pick-up truck) and go check the traps. The empty traps we would just drive past. But the ones with possums in them become exciting. When a possum is in the trap a person has to go up to the trap, lower down to the partner, and then get the possum out. The possum goes into a pillow case where they are then processed. In processing we take measurements of the foot length, head width, and head length. We also see who they are (gender wise), take a DNA sample (cut a tiny piece of ear off), and then give them some bling in the form of a metal tag that gets clipped onto the same ear for easier future identification. After processing we would then let the possum go near the spot where we caught them. We would either process on the spot, or if there were a few possums we would take them home with us and put them into a dark quiet cupboard for the day, processing them later in the arvo (afternoon), and then let them go before dark. Sometimes processing on the spot was slow because the possums were very squirmy and fidgety, compared to the ones who had cupboard time, who would normally be quieter and more relaxed. We only ever had one possum escape during processing, and that was on the second to last day. So that is how you trap and process the possums!

So the checking and prcessing took up the mornings pretty well. So what did we do to take up the arvo's? Well we would go out and check nest boxes. Nest boxes are basically bird houses that are put up out in the bush, except they aren't for birds. They would contain either a: a big spider, b: an Antechinus, or c: a Sugar Glider. Thankfully we didn't get any spiders, but we did get quite a few sugar gliders and luckily we caught three Antechinus's. An Antechinus is a marsupial rodent who looks like a mouse with an elongated head, sharp teeth and claws, and a suicidal bad attitude. They were alright. But the best thing was the Sugar Gliders. They are basically flying squirrels, but much cuter, smaller, and they are marsupials. We found nine Gliders all together. We would process the Gliders and Antechinus's just like the possums, except we wouldn't put tags on them because the tags could be a little big for the little guys.

In case you are confused the thing on the upper right is an Antechinus and the little guy, or girl really, in my hand is a Sugar Glider. And no, I'm not holding her tightly, she was just trying to escape from every possible angle imaginable so I had to prevent that. The Antechinus on the other hand, had to be gripped tightly so as to prevent it from escaping and biting the holder. So naturally, Mel held them.

So this was my trip. Two weeks of hard and repetitive work that tested integrity, courage, and disicipline. Because, after hours of taking traps down, one just wants to drop to the ground and throw a temper tantrum. Thankfully there was none of that, but we came close. But I'm really glad I went, and I can't wait to be able to do field work of my own some day.

An explanation of odd random phenomena you may have noticed in these pictures. The banadana wearing is not really a style, a gang sign, or an act or rebellion. I am wearing a bandana in every one of these pictures because, A: they kept my head and face dry from rain and sweat, B: they kept my head warm in the cold mornings and evenings, and C: they make me look rogue-ishly handsome. The other thing is that during the entire trip is that I didn't shave the entire time. It was really for fun to see what it would look like after two weeks, and since there was no parent to badger me about it I just had fun with it. I came no where near Dad's beard or Mum's legs, but I liked it all the same. Hope you enjoyed this fun little report on my personal adventure.