fruit bat vs. possum

Last night I heard a horrible screechy racket outside.  The main fig crop is just starting to ripen (not ripe enough for humans to eat, but ripe enough for animals) so I knew it was either a fruit bat or possum.  I went out with a torch to see if I could figure out which it was.  I saw a rustle lower down and tried to find a possum but the branches are so thick this year I couldn't see anything.  Then I looked up to see this bold fellow staring back at me.

He didn't seem at all bothered by the torch or the camera flash, cheeky fellow.  But then I saw a flash of gray fur and a fluffy tail, lo and behold there was also a brush-tailed possum in the tree!  Again, unperturbed by my attention.

I know we've got a local ring tailed possum but this is the first time I've seen a brushy in my yard.  It's not really good news, they're more destructive than their smaller cousins, so I hope he's (she's?) only here for fig season.  And after all that, I still don't know who was making all that racket. I just know they were fighting over who deserved the first figs.

Although I didn't get a picture, these weren't the only wildlife I found in my garden this weekend.  I was checking on my watermelons the other day when I caught a flash of brown darting across the straw mulch.  It startled me because my first thought was it was a tiny snake.  But no, I think it was another weasel skink like the one I found in the garage last year.  By the time I grabbed the camera and came back I couldn't find him again.  But I'm just so happy to know he was there, lizards are a great sign of a healthy garden.

hungry hungry poss-poss

My local possum has a green tooth. They're known for eating fruit and flowers but mine eats greens. It never lets a hardenbergia vine flower because it eats every new shoot. I have stood and watched it gnaw at the pine bushes outside the back door. And the other day I found that it savaged my pea shoots. I suspected snails at first but I don't have too many snails about considering how quickly they were chewed down to stems. And then I noticed that a few stems had been snapped clean off and carried to another part of the bed before being finished off -a bit of a trick for snails to pull off. And this is all that's left of them.

Luckily it's still early in the season, so I planted some more snow peas and put a bird net over the bed. These plants may survive and if not the new seeds will sprout, and hopefully I'll still have snow peas before the winter is over. My luck with snow peas is absolutely rotten!

In the meantime, my second batch of gai lan and broccoli have sprouted, as well as a few radishes I threw in for fun. Hopefully I'll be harvesting them within the next few months.

focaccia and possum

Two very random things.  The first is that I made my second focaccia.  I promise not to take pictures of every single bread product I make but I was very happy with the improvement on this focaccia over the last one - more light and fluffy this time because its second rise went better.  Thick enough to slice and use for sandwiches if we wanted.  It didn't last enough for sandwiches this time!

The second is a random photo of our local possum.  I was taking out the compost last night and heard a rustle.  A quick peek revealed that the little poss-poss was caught out behind a shrub at the back fence.  She looked a lot smaller than the big fatty I snapped in the fig tree, so my guess is this is a female and the other was a male.  They are pretty freaking adorable even if they can be annoying.  I'd much rather share my garden with them than with rats (which I have also spotted on the fence before).

fig visitors

I know I spent a lot of time last year gushing about how much I love my fig tree.  But well, I do.  And it isn't just eating them.  I like figs - I don't adore them the way some people do, but I like them.  It's more that in fig season I suddenly have so many friends!  Family and friends and neighbours love them too and it makes me happy to bring them around to people.  And ofcourse they make the birds happy too!

The lorikeets are my favourites.  They always wait a few weeks until there are quite a few figs ripe before coming to visit.  But tonight I met some of the night time visitors who also enjoy the figs.

I'm pretty sure the fruit bats are visiting.  I saw them flying very low in my yard, usually I only see them high above flying between the large botanical gardens in Melbourne.  But when I got out the flashlight to see if I could spot some bats, this is who I found instead!

It's our resident ringtail possum.  You can just see the white tip of her tail holding the branch below her.

I love my fig tree.  It provides more than enough for the birds, possums, bats, and for the humans.

critters

Here are a few of the critters I've found around the place so far.  I'll start with the "icky" ones.

This is a mole cricket.  I found it when I was digging up the raised bed to make it a veggie patch.  Scared the crap out of me at first because it was so big and freaky and I had no idea what it was (it's a few inches long by the way).  I even thought it was dead, it wasn't moving at first but woke up a bit after a while.  After a bit of research I learned that they're nocturnal, silent crickets that generally live underground or in mulch.  They can chew on roots, but generally they don't do much damage and you should let them be.  I put him back in the dirt.

This next critter is a shining cockroach.  Mostly I see them outside - under the lid of the recycling bin, in the garage door jam.  But once I found one inside the rim of the dishwasher, which freaked me out and made me worry that they were the "bad", indoor kind.  But no, they're wingless, native to Australia, and they prefer the great outdoors.  They don't eat people food, they don't breed inside, and they don't carry disease like the German cockroach that infests kitchens.  This is the one I found inside, but I just put it back outside where it belonged.  They're also fairly long, over an inch long, which is bigger than the German roaches.

Once I even found a big fat grub in the ground under the pencil pines.  I didn't take a photo, so I'm borrowing one from another website to show you how nasty they look.  It went in the bin, they munch away at roots and are pests.







And finally, the cute critters.  Possums in Australia are much cuter than American possums.  But they're a bit of a pest, like squirrels - cute but destructive.  They like to eat roses, herbs and fruit, and get in fights with house cats (the possums usually win, or run away).  They can be quite loud when they're fighting, and if you're not careful they like to nest in your roof.  You can't kill them, they're a protected species, though you can hire someone to trap them and move them to another area.  So far I've been super-lucky, they've left my plants alone.

They're generally nocturnal, so I was very surprised to find these two little angels in my lemon tree one afternoon in daylight. 

These two are still practically babies and should be with their mother.  The one at the top of the tree was making little alarm calls, but they didn't run away when I took photos.  I hope they wound up OK, I'm a little worried their mom may have been hit by a car, but they weren't there the next day.

But don't you agree that they're so much cuter than American possums?