Ruud Kleinpaste: Possums - weird damage patterns and awful noises

Damage in the garden can strike at any time.  

Serious leaf damage (chewing and molesting of foliage all the way down the branches of a tree or shrub) is not something that small birds tend to do.   

At ground level you can rightly guess that sparrows and quail are the possible delinquents, but when it really looks like full-on destruction you will need to do a bit of research:  

Large bites in leaves: classic possum damage! Skeletonised Pohutukawa was bringing the trees to extinction – Project Crimson was the organisation that started the rescue mission.  

Possums work on their local, favourite tree in the neighbourhood – constant chewing puts trees under pressure to make more leaves, often with an increased amount of sugar – Yum!  

Bark damage is easy to spot: big scratches up and down the tree. Possum poo (1-1.5 cm in length) is often found under the tree – a dead give-away!  

But the most ridiculous damage in your garden is possum chewing on fruit, especially citrus. It’s often like the possum helps you to peel the fruit – it only seems to like that peel and doesn’t often touch the fruit, unless it is very sweet and ripe.  

Possums are rather destructive eaters. They eat a decent number of different trees – their favourites are Pohutukawa, Totara, Kohekohe, and Tawa, and their feeding habits literally have an impact on the make-up of our forests.  

That means that our forests are often changed in composition, which in turn could have an impact on the sequestering of carbon.  

All possums in New Zealand together eat about 21,000 tonnes of vegetable material – almost equivalent to the weight of the Sky tower!  They also eat birds, and the eggs in their nest, and many larger insect species. 

At night, possums roam their territory. They are not always easy to find, as they are rather sneaky when going from tree to garden. We used to have them in the city of Auckland and many people simply didn’t believe they would have them in densely populated areas.  

But even on quiet nights, possums can be heard making their special noises: growling, hissing, and screeching.   

Possum control is best attempted with the good old “Possum Trap”, also known as the Timms Trap.  

There are also the newer models of re-setting traps. 

Cam Speedy is a brilliant trapper and his best lure for possums is the following mixture:  

Make a “blaze” with flour (1 kg) and icing sugar (100 gr), plus 15 ml of cinnamon, peach, eucalyptus, or vanilla essence. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Tame podcast
from News Talks at be Route.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Climb passes our man in the garden, Good morning.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Good morning Jack. Have you got possums?

Speaker 2 (00:20):
We don't have possums. I look, I'm knocking wood everywhere.
I actually think at the moment, we don't have too many.
Peace I'm not even sure that we have rats at
the moment. I put out my trap and I get
nothing in it.

Speaker 3 (00:32):
Oh okay, well that that sounds good.

Speaker 4 (00:34):
Maybe we could change some bait, yes, to just make sure,
you know.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Maybe they can smell me. That's always my concern, you know.

Speaker 4 (00:42):
Yes, exactly exactly. I remember Paul Home saying the same thing. No,
I haven't got possums. So I taught him how to
how to imitate possums, like he says, I hear it
every night.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
He said, Yeah, and you know all the damage you're getting, yeah,
on your fruit trees and everything else. Yeah, I think
they might have something.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yes, it does exactly. There was a funny actually, but
you're absolutely right that the side work.

Speaker 4 (01:09):
I've chuck some pictures in there of all sorts of
trees that they have been literally due to bump to
buggery as we call it, with bipossums, and you don't
sometimes really realize that that's what these guys are doing.
It's unbelievable. The other sign is scratches on the back,
so when they climb up, they have these enormous uh

(01:32):
what do you call it, and feet that can actually
make these enormous cratches. And it's probably also a marking
of territory. I would say, that's what that is. Yeah.
And then under underneath the tree always find their pools
as well, which are quite clever to see. They're slightly
bigger than red spools of twice three times the size,

(01:52):
if you like, and quite solid, but you can always
tell them that's uh, that's those are the gigs. And
it's really good. But what you just mentioned was really
called the old lemon trees and mandarin trees and things
like that.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
Goodness me. Yeah, have you ever seen it?

Speaker 2 (02:09):
No, I mean I've I've seen not I'm not sure
I've seen it on the on the fruit trees necessarily,
I've seen the photos and the fruit trees. But I
mean they absolutely go to town, right.

Speaker 4 (02:20):
They certainly do, especially the Boss, especially in terms of
fans of citrus. They to the the whole skin off,
not the actual fruit.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
Often it's just somebody.

Speaker 4 (02:32):
Who's been there overnight and basically feeling all the skin
off the fruit. And it's just incredible to see that
that's what they tend to like to do. Yeah, that's
exactly what it is. So the problem we had earlier
on a couple of decades ago, you know, when we
set that project Crimson Ohise, Porto Kawa was being done
up by these these robbers and and it's basically what

(02:55):
we try to achieve to get that stopped and to
get the PoTA kawa back in Northland in good numbers.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
And that's been working quite well. Actually, that's nice.

Speaker 4 (03:06):
But then I came across a bit of a statistic.
If you take all the possums in New Zealand together,
they eat each side twenty one thousand tons of vegetable material.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
What. Yeah, and that's not why do we have that
much available for them?

Speaker 3 (03:26):
No, that's it.

Speaker 4 (03:27):
And that is, of course, that's, by the way, the
same weight as the sky tower.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Oh my goodness.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:34):
So that means that a lot of trees are being damaged, absolutely, yeah.
And that also means that, of course there will be
all sorts of troubles our with our carbon sequestration and
all that sort of stuff that keeps on going. So
what do you do? Get a possum trip? Yeah, and

(03:54):
you know one of those tim strips or a flip
and timmy.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
They're good.

Speaker 4 (03:59):
But they said, you've also got these trips that reset
themselves and they go time after time after time.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
And here comes the best gig I have for you.

Speaker 4 (04:08):
That's from Cam Speedy, the guy that pus said the
Kiwi uwe last week we were were talking about kiwi
and doing it. You make a blaze which is a
white drawn thing on the trunk with flour one kilogram
and icing sugar, have a go.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Oh nice, add a bit of cinnamon bit, a peach bit,
a eucalyptus, maybe some vanilla resents.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
Sounds like we go boy.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, it would be a last dish for those possums.
Thank you so much for We'll put that little mix
actually from Cam up on the News talks 'DB website.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame. Listen live
to News Talks i'd be from nine am Saturday, or
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