THE COMMON BRUSHTAIL POSSUM

In the urban centres of South East Australia, Common Brushtail Possums are hated. They’re hated for being noisy, for being aggressive, for being ugly, for being destructive, racist, dodgy bosses, bad mothers, selfish lovers, for punching cyclists, for pissing on the ozone layer, for Packed to the Rafters, for the use of the term ‘bling’ by my mother, for the enduring career of Jennifer Hawkins even though she’s the human equivalent of a Coles docket.

Common Brushtail Possums are not well liked, is my point. 

In the Common Brushtails defense, I’m here to tell you what I told my ex- that which you hate about them (me) are the things that make them (me) special. It is thus that I am leaving you (not you) for a life of promise (my parents’ house). Give me some space (a lift to the train station).

If you don’t know what a Common Brushtail Possum looks like, let me sketch you a picture world with my word pencils. They’re about the size of a cat and range in colour from reddy brown to grey-y brown to grey-y reddy browny grey blacky whitey grey-y grey. Common brushtails sort of look like a sentient ball of dryer lint, but that’s not their fault. Like any good camouflagenist (probably not a word) they’re just mirroring the colour of the place they live, which is Australian eucalypts. And Australian eucalypts, to quote Banjo Paterson, are grey as shit. If you want an interesting-coloured animal you need to go to the ocean where pods of blue whales use their total invisibility against the blue water to mug sharks or South America, where panthers are black because it is mainly night and everyone is a Goth.

SOME BACKGROUND, LIGHTLY SEASONED WITH FACTS

As Melbourne city became more established and urbanised, many species of mammal that were native to the Melbourne area found themselves relegated in diminished numbers to less densely populated, natively vegetated areas in Victoria. Here they could still do things like eat and sleep and successfully avoid dying at the paws of an overweight, asthmatic housecat.

The Common Brushtail had a vastly different experience of urban Melbourne. In fact, they managed to make such a go of it in the Big Smoke that they are now the largest occurrence of any native Australian mammal. They are everywhere; in the trees, in the roofs, in any cavity in brickwork that isn’t already occupied by some painfully casual café that you can only fit your shinbone in and is manned by a barrister called 'Cereal'. Common Brushtails are remarkably successful and their success boils down to the fact that they are as adaptable as a Demtel kitchen utensil. 

I’M GOING TO KEEP TALKING ABOUT THIS

Common Brushtails are adaptable for a few reasons. Firstly, they are dietary generalists. This means that unlike many other Australian mammals, they don’t rely on specific plants or prey for their food. They eat eucalypts, fruits, flowers and insects, depending on what’s closest to their mouth at the time it’s open. For the Common Brushtail then, the urban garden, with its compost bins, decorative flowers, fruit trees and vegetable patches is a buffet wonderland festooned with bits of your old egg.

Secondly, Common Brushtails possess a very low metabolic rate. This allows them to survive in adverse conditions and with less food. It’s similar to how Angelina Jolie survives, when she goes on her daily hike into the wilderness of her own ego.

Thirdsomely, Common Brushtails have a big, adaptable brain. Unlike other marsupials like the koala- that falls off the perch at the smallest disturbance in its habitat or diet- the Common Brushtail just rewires a bit and continues on, like a heroic robot of olde.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Common Brushtail adaptability is their social behaviour. Or rather, it’s interesting if you’re me. From what I understand a lot of you aren’t me, so if you’re bored and want to leave this blog, here’s a link to something else. See you round.

Those guys are idiots for leaving. They’re going to miss the shitty graphs I’ve made.

Below is a shitty graph I made showing the division of activities within the average Common Brushtail day. To put it in perspective, I’ve done a side-by-side comparison with me, a female human freelancer:

As you can see, a Common Brushtail Possum grooms considerably more than your average female human freelancer.  Similar to the average female human freelancer however, Common Brushtails spend very little time with their own species. During the mating season, it takes 30 days for a male to get close enough to a female to get some action- such is the females desire to be left alone with her Roseanne boxset and the aioli she just found on her top. 

‘But why?’ I hear no one ask. ‘Why don’t Common Brushtails like each other?”

Well Jiggy McFakename, it’s because the Common Brushtail is a large animal that requires a lot of food and a big nest to survive. As such, Common Brushtails simply can’t share the resources of a territory with another individual. And so they live alone, like novelists and murderers and precocious, wet-lipped 9-year-old boys who can’t wait to teach some Yuletide robbers a lesson.

So hellbent are Common Brushtails on their solitude that they have developed a number of ways to warn other Brushtails off their territory. First is a series of threatening body postures, as evidenced in the drawing below:

Next is a highly developed larynx that makes close to 20 distinct vocalisations. These vocalisations are normally heard just outside your bedroom window at 1am after you’ve stupidly watched a Japanese horror film about a haunted minidisk player on SBS. The sounds, as you well know, range from the low growl of something that is probably going to kill you, to the rasping hiss of something that is definitely going to kill you. And so you curl up into a tight ball of bedsheets, listening to the commotion outside until finally, fear cuts off circulation to your brain and you pass out, dribbling and pantless.

In fact, Common Brushtail possums use these vocal acrobatics to make sure their basic message of “Get the shitting fuck out of my tree” is articulated without having to resort to potentially fatal physical contact. It’s a very smart ploy for the survival of their species, but for our species, is like trying to sleep through a metal dinosaur dry-humping your eardrums.

It is this very subject of Common Brushtails and humans that I’m segueing into seamlessly with this sentence. 


YOU AND COMMON BRUSHTAILS AND YOU AND COMMON BRUSHTAILS AND YOU


Common Brushtails require a tree that’s 115cm in diameter to create a nest. For a eucalypt to be that big it needs to be at least 200 years old. And given a 200-year-old tree is hard to come by in urban Melbourne, Common Brushtails improvise- using their smarts and your roof.

People tend to think they have a Common Brushtail Possum in their roof when in fact they have rats, ghosts or ratghosts. You can ascertain who is subletting your house a few different ways: 

1.  A Wiji board. A very effective device if you have ghosts, using a Wiji board will however, put your home at risk of infestation by hysterical twelve-year-old girls and their affiliated nighttime dental wear.

2.  A Census. Slip a copy into an air vent along with some pencils and retrieve a few days later to discover that our education system has completely failed our marsupials.

3.  Pawprints. Common Brushtail front pawprints have five evenly spaced toes and the hind foot has kind of a thumb mark. Uncommon Brushtail pawprints have Goldrush-era wagon wheel indentations and a trail of slime.

4.  If you want to stop enjoying your life for a bit, crawl into your roof and in the half-dark, really investigate the fecal matter of your tenant. Common Brushtail poo is 1.5-2 cm long and cylindrical, rodent poo is smaller and spherical. Frankly, we were fools to ever confuse them.  

If you do indeed have a Common Brushtail in your roof and you’re no longer enjoying the smell of marsupial piss in your wall cavities, you’ll have to remove it at some stage. Just remember that all Australian native species are protected, meaning you can’t harm an animal or remove it from its territory.  So if you trap your possum and deposit it in some random patch of shrubbery two suburbs over- thus releasing it into certain death**- please know that not only are your actions illegal but reincarnation-wise, you’ll be coming back as a rat STI***.

So here’s what you do. First, make a nest box for your possum. Next, either wait for your possum to leave the roof for the night, or if you like a challenge and facial wounds, try to capture it when it’s still inside the roof. Once the possum is out via your preferred method, seal up that roof like a Nordic waterway. Then release your possum back into your garden, protecting your genitals from attack with one hand and pointing excitedly at the nest box with the other****. Then, over the coming months, rejoice in the wildlife at your doorstep by doing a series of backyard watercolour paintings that you never, ever give to me as a gift.

CONCLUSIONS

In my 31 years on the planet, I’ve had two Common Brushtail Possums rush my head, I’ve had three swipe at my face, I’ve been wrenched from sleep countless times by their screeches, I’ve had their urine drip down my ceiling onto my bedspread and one evening on my way home from work, I was pursued by an uncommonly fast Brushtail through the length of the Carlton Gardens and into oncoming traffic on Nicholson St. And even then, as my life flashed before my eyes and I realised that I’d mainly spent it watching the West Wing, I didn’t hate Common Brushtails. 


So I suppose my point is, you should all try and be more like me. 

Have a great weekend.

Snake Mechano xx

I’d like to thank Kim Hollis from Healesville Sanctuary for her help compiling this report. She is a complete delight and knows more about possums than you do about your own bellybutton. You should go and visit her at Healesville- it is truly the most wondrous place in Melbourne. If I could, I would live there- nestled between a feeding bag and half a tonne of manure. I’ve had a gin.

Here is a link to instructions for building a nest box.
http://www.tvwc.org.au/help/article13/building%20a%20brushtail%20possum%20nestbox.pdf
Have fun.

If you find an injured possum or indeed, any injured wildlife, please contact Healesville Sanctuary. They're extremely good at this stuff. http://www.zoo.org.au/Healesville/AWHC/Contact

*Furthermore, Common Brushtails do not have a set size to their territory and are squat, short-tempered geniuses at figuring out the resources available in an area and the minimum distance individuals can live next to each other. In rural areas, where their habitat has been severely depleted by farming, that may only be one animal per 80 hectares, but in the city it can often figure out to be one possum per garden/roof. Unless things have gone horribly afoul or have become very, very sexy, you will not see two Brushtails living in the same tree.

** In order for a territory to be viable, it needs three things; a stable supply of water, a stable supply of food and a place to nest. Just because a tract of land has plants doesn’t mean that it’s a viable habitat. And even if it has all those things, that territory has probably already been claimed by another animal. Studies show that if you release a Common Brushtail into a new territory, even though it is an incredibly resilient species, it will more than likely die. It is thus better- and legal - to leave Common Brushtails to decide where they should set up shop.

***And even if you did get rid of your Common Brushtail, their social order is so tight that within 24 hours, the viable territory that is your garden will be claimed by another possum. Resistence is thus futile, friends. It’s better just to accommodate them or move to a place that has no possums, like Africa. Africa just has lions.

**** Just don’t feed the possum once it’s in there. You can put some fruit or honey at the entrance of the nest box just to entice it in, but continually feeding a possum is just dumb. It means other possums will come and you’ll end up blowing your house deposit on food for an ever-growing army of unruly, sharp-toothed marsupials.

THE HUNTSMAN SPIDER

For my first radio segment on 3RRR I decided to talk about Huntsman spiders. Noble as this plan was, it forgot that the only public speaking I've ever done has centred around me crying in a supermarket. So instead of an easy back and forth about a pretty great animal, 3RRR’s listenership was treated to six minutes of me gurgling like a bog clogged with a sock.

Fortunately I live in the magical age of the internet with its surplus of boobs and racists and status updates regarding who ate a muffin where. So I’m going to take this opportunity to tell you a little sexy sumthin’ sumthin' about one of my favourite spiders. It is both bad and long. Enjoy. 

A BLONG GUIDE TO HUNTSMAN SPIDERS

You might be familiar with Huntsman spiders from such things as your ceiling or your doona or above your bathroom door when you need to piss at 3am.  Because of their size, they tend to make people invert with fear till they’re just an iPhone with toes. For instance, here is a conversation I recently had with my boyfriend over breakfast.

Me: I’m going to talk about Huntsman spiders on 3RRR on Friday.

RFC: Why Huntsman?

Me: I guess I’m-

RFC: Can see one on me?

Me: No.

RFC: Jesus. There’s one on me.

Me: There’s not. 

RFC: Yes there is.

Waiter: Ready to order?

Me: Yes-

RFC: No. A spider is laying eggs in my ear.

People seem to think spiders launch themselves into existence with their fangs trained on humanity. And then they devote their 2-5 years on the planet to trying to kill us when we’re asleep or on the toilet or both.  In reality, spiders have a very simple brain that is great for doing what they need to do (catching prey, procreating, maintaining secret lives as AFL coaches) but not great for judging and punishing us as people- even if you’re the one who invented that ‘feminine’ spray that makes a woman’s undercarriage smell like a dead Barbie Doll. Although if you are that person, I sincerely hope Karma has crushed you into a soup. 

Unlike other spiders that ambush their foodstuffs, Huntsman chase down their prey- invertebrates and small skinks- over short distances like teeny tiny ratball-ugly lions. This means they need, and indeed have, great eyesight- a rarity in the spider world. Most spiders have between 6 to 8 eyes but honestly, who the fuck knows what the majority do with them. Tarantulas, for instance, are basically blind and rely heavily on the vibrations in their body hair to catch prey. Which is what I do too- which is why I rarely wax and how I got a boyfriend.

There are over 1000 species of Huntsman in the world, over 100 in Australia and if you live in Melbourne, 3 behind you right now. All have the same basic shape; flat bodies to help them hide under flat things such as bark and really tired supermodels; and long legs arranged in a crab-like configuration to help them scuttle sideways into your sock drawer. This side to side mobility is rare in spiders and means they are agile hunters, hence their name which if you can’t remember, is ‘Huntsman’ you stupid idiots, pay attention.

Now that you’re focused and I’m drunk, here is a brief rundown of the species of Huntsman spiders you’ll find in the greater Melbourne area. 

The Huntsman

Otherwise known as the Huntsman, there is no common name for the Huntsman so I like to call him the Huntsman- or the Huntsman for short. A timid spider that enjoys basic cognition and being huge, these guys are the ones most likely to spend time in our houses and can have a leg diameter of up to 160mm. Their bodies are grey and mottled like the trunks of the old eucalypts that should still be where our kitchens now stand. And if you park your car under a tree, you might find yourself having an argument with a Huntsman that involves him wanting to crawl across your steering wheel and you wanting to exit the vehicle whilst on a freeway.

The Badge Huntsman

Smaller than the Huntsman Classic and terracotta in colour, Badge Huntsman are named for the pattern of two eyes on the underside of their abdomen- a ploy that when they rear up, makes them appear bigger to predators. A bunch of other animals use these eye marks to fool predators including species of butterfly and frog and probably humans in their use of Cats: The Musical t-shirts when they’re on foot in a bad neighbourhood like Kew.

Yeah take that, Kew. I won’t stop till your decorative urns are filled with your tears, you well-mannered fucks.

Finally, we come to my favourite species.

The Social Huntsman

These guys and gals are red with black flourishes on the tips of their limbs. They are named for their social behaviour- a trait that is as rare in the arachnid world as me enjoying jazz is in the human. During times of mating, Social Huntsman form colonies of up to three generations of the same family, headed by a matriarch. The nest sites are usually found in old logs or behind loose eucalypt bark and they will be passed down from the dominant female to a dominant daughter over consecutive mating seasons to avoid anyone having to rejoin the housing market.

In 1990, this commendable disinterest in eating members of their own family thrust a group of Social Huntsman into the spotlight when they starred in the comedy horror hit Arachnophobia, alongside everyone’s dad, John Goodman, and everyone’s creepy-as-shit uncle, Julian Sands.  Over 400 Social Huntsman played the unholy babies of a Brazilian Tarantula called Pete* and were moved around set by professional spider wranglers armed with nothing more than their reflexes and some hairdryers set on ‘low’. Twenty-one years later and the legacy of that film is still being felt by a generation of me’s who, when crouched in the darkest recess of 3am, is convinced her death will involve both a spider crawling out of her nostril and Julian Sands leching over her corpse.

This leads me uncleanly, to my next point.

The Huntsman and You and possibly Julian Sands.  

Huntsman are fast, agile and possess fangs to catch prey and defend themselves. And that’s it. They’ve genuinely got nothing else, not even a snarky blog. As a result, they’ve managed to survive as a species because they’re great at risk assessment. A Huntsman deciding to attack a human for shits and giggles would be like us surveying a heavily armed military ship then lunging at its hull with a Paddlepop stick, before being sucked into a propeller. Even if the majority of your body weight is made up fangs like a mouse spider, going something 500 times your size is just not smart behaviour if you well, want to exist. And so Huntsman will run from the perceived threat (your hand), to perceived safety (your head). 

As roaming hunters, Huntsman will realise there is nothing to eat in your house within a few days and they will leave. But if you can’t wait that long or insist on keeping a cow carcass covered in flies in your hall, spray the Huntsman with water mist till it exits through an open window. Otherwise, the old take-away container and a Who Weekly/Financial Times/Baby Photo of a Baby You Hate should do the trick. Just escort them outside to an old tree or a patch of leaf litter, hug them tight against your bosom, stare into their 6-8 eyes and in a voice choked with sobs, whisper that you’ll always love them. Then kiss them with all the passion of Eros with a boner. Fade to black.  

In the highly unlikely event that you do get bitten, don’t start organizing a burial plot and reconciling with your mother. She can wait. Huntsman venom is filled with toxins that immobilise invertebrates, but only cause a small reaction in humans- localised swelling, some redness, nausea equivalent to that experienced when shown weird ‘incest-chic’ press photos of Angus and Julia Stone. So if you are bitten, you really only have two options available to you- either update Twitter or update Facebook. Any other course of action will be utterly useless.

A Final Words…

Superannuation. Mandatory participation in swimming relays. Experimental theatre. Coldplay. These are things to genuinely fear- not a leggy, timid spider that just wants to eat, sleep and get their fuck on with spiders of their kind. Be nice to Huntsman; they eat your house pests and are food for the possums that are in turn food for the owls that are in turn food for the skytigers that are themselves consumed by the giant laser orbs that circle the earth, producing ever more exciting mobile ringtones. In conclusion, it’s like Elton John’s monster hit “The Circle of Life” but even more factually inaccurate.   

Bless you all and I’ll see you again in the dead of night when you least expect it.

Koot MacNanaree

I’d like to thank Rowena, a live exhibits keeper at Museum Victoria. She assures me that even though she devotes much of her life to the care of Huntsman, she still hates handling them.

By the by, Rowena is currently rearing Huntsman spiderlings that are getting big and are in need of loving homes. So do contact me if you find Labrador puppies needy and drowsy kittens a bit ‘crass’.

* I’m not going to go into this too much, but having a primitive spider** give birth to 400 modern spiders ***was a massive continuity error that I’m sure enraged tens and tens of entomologists worldwide. I bet they even looted stuff- off their own desks of course, because they didn’t want to inconvenience anyone.

**He got them primitive book lungs and ‘pick-axe’ fangs and his ancestors have been fucking shit up for invertebrates and small rodents since the time of the dinosaurs.

*** They got them spiracle tubes as well as them book lungs and pincer-like fangs and they only came about 160 000 years ago. Evolution-wise, they’re teenagers and you can’t tell them what to do.