.
>
> Rats are another possibility. Less likely, I hope! Back in the '60s a
> friend living at Windsor in Brisbane was having trouble with something
> eating his pawpaws just before they were ripe enough to pick. Looked
> with the torch on numerous occasions and could never get a glimpse of the
> culprit. Eventually he got desperate enough to load a .22 calibre
> rifle with a rat-shot cartridge, and fixed it in position aimed at the
> bottom of the pawpaw. Waited until he heard something at the pawpaw then
> fired.
> Result: one large rat. And a very serious problem for the Forestry
> Dept was (is?) rats chewing the bark off young hoop pines in the Yarraman
> plantations. And now that I come to think of it, I did see some bush
> lemons on Lord Howe Island with some of the peel eaten. LH has rats
> but no possums.
>
> Once I was camped out in the Conondale Ranges, hoping to hear Albert
> Lyrebirds: if they were once in the Mary Valley as egg-collector Sid
> Jackson recorded in his diary early this century, surely they would
> still be there? No lyrebirds, but at night some small creature was rustling
> over the dry leaves around my camp stretcher. Time after time, I lined up
> a torch on the sound then switched it on. Never got so much as a
> glimpse of anything departimg. So next night I tied a (used) T-bone steak
> bone
> on a log and focussed my camera (with flash-light) on it. Again never got
> a glimpse of whatever it was, but when the film was developed I had a
> nice shot of an Antechinus in full flight, all four feet well clear of the
> log! Fantastic speed!
>
> But I digress. A ringtail is my best guess/hope. Are there any
> densely leafy trees in the near neighbourhood that might conceal a roughly
> spherical nest of possum size?
>
> Cheers
>
> Syd
>
> H Syd Curtis
>
>
>
Re Fruit-eating Fauna
I remember being told of a man in Castlemaine (Vic) whose cherries were
being eaten by, he thought, a possum. He lurked with his shotgun and
fired at the form above him in the tree. What fell on his head was a
Fox!
Incidentally we used to have a Ringtail in our houseroof. A less rowdy
tenant
than the Brushtail but we were glad when we finally got our house
possum-free.
Anthea Fleming in Melbourne
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