At 20:10 h on 16
November 2022 at my home in Holt I heard loud, repetitive wirra wirra
calls of a male Eastern Koel together with the grunting, hissing sounds of an agitated Brush-tailed Possum.
I went outside where the light was receding rapidly and, with cautious use of a torch, located the possum crouched on a power cable above my property boundary. With its shoulders hunched and head thrust forward while hissing and snarling, it manifested extreme
aggression as it crept towards the koel perched three metres away. When it came to within two metres of the koel the latter moved to a higher strand of cable and gave two more penetrating
wirra wirra calls before flying away. Scarcely had the male departed than a female landed on the same spot, gave three extremely strident, brassy
keekking calls and left.
When the female koel alighted and called, the possum immediately inverted and, with its prehensile tail looped around the cable, scurried away into the gathering dark
seemingly as quickly as if it had remained upright, paws surging like pistons in a horizontally-opposed engine. Incidentally, possums seem to use cables as pathways through the suburbs.
Soon after I went indoors, koels began calling from several locations in the nearby area, or perhaps there may have been only one or two birds moving around. Another thought:
in my limited experience with koels, they are ventriloqual, or somehow appear to be. Anyhow, I could hear the calls until I retired at 11:00 h.
I woke around dawn and they were still calling although less frequently as the light increased, ceasing some 20 minutes after sunrise. This incident seems all the more
remarkable because koels remain unusual in my area of Holt.
John Layton
Holt.
