Possum …
A little banana satisfies a prowling possum. She is wild but still feels safe enough to take from the hand.
*Click on the pictures for a proper look … and click again
This ring-tail possum is more secretive, only showing up after the other and later in the night when food is gone.
She’s a tough little thing, solid muscle. You’d have to be to do the aerobatics she does on the roof at nigh and survive.
She waited for me to go before resuming her approach to a little food. It will take time to know her well.
And a little bread, wholemeal with grain and/or seed, no white bread and no sugar or other additions. Just plain food.
… the other one.
They come from above at night. One from across the road, travelling on the power line. Another from the roof of the house. Both are looking for food.
And since they are already here, and there’s no denying them – can’t evict the one in the roof and the other lives elsewhere – so I feed them on occasion.
They appear to be gentle creatures but they are also wild nature and not to be treated with carelessly. The grey will take food from the hand but the other is too wary – different treatment at home perhaps.
It’s one of life’s pleasures, attending the wild creatures, big and small. One of my pleasures.
We’ve got to give space to something besides ourselves, or they/it will all disappear.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on those pictures for a closer look
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Possum 2
Hello Possum … just looking for a bite to eat.
Yin and yang. The two principles of existence.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on the picture for a closer look
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Possum
I went out the back door last night and as I closed it a Possum came out of the roof along the beam and stopped dead and looked me in the eye. She looked a little lost with those big eyes fixed on me. I said hello and she didn’t seem to be afraid so I put a bit of homemade biscuit in front of her. She was about to examine it when a bigger Possum came up behind her and made a nuisance of himself, chasing her off along the beams of the veranda roof. He looked a little lost too when he realised I was there, maybe a little alarmed to see me so close, two feet, no more. And when he went off after her he didn’t sense the biscuit under his nose. I have often heard something falling from the roof to the ground through the thick palm trees around the house. I believe it is a Possum losing its footing or being chased off by the other bigger one. That must hurt.
I’ve been getting some good Dragon pix lately. Good as in sharp and in focus with soft warm afternoon sunlight. Opportunities for natural light captures where there is something to brace against, and flash assisted ones to stop the action in the wind. I was shooting a mature red Dragon at one of my favourite spots and it was so attuned to my presence after a few minutes I was able to touch a wing with my finger. That was nice and it was acknowledged. Sweet thing. Who ever calls a Dragonfly sweet thing? Ha!
While I was shooting the Dragon was frequently chasing down what passed by on the wind, coming and going from its perch. Once she almost landed on my ear with a loud flapping of her gossamer wings, another time I heard and felt her stop on my hat for a few seconds before she returned to the stick. One time she landed on the diffuser of the camera’s flash and almost immediately slipped off the smooth hard material. I think she was playing with me, why not.
And the moon is rising, big in the afternoon sky, sinking in the west soon enough after dark. A cold wind blows tonight. Maybe it’s time for trousers.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Double Summer
Rain came with the cooling of summer and the autumn has turned to a mild spring, as far as some creatures and flowers are concerned. And the sunshine at this time is lovely, bright and warm. Beautiful, in a word, though the word can’t hold it.
It seems some of the forms of life here can’t stand the heat of summer and hold off blossoming and mating until it ends. Walking in the nearby fields for a couple of days it became clear a new season had begun, not autumn or summer. Dragonflies are back in another wave, along with some bugs and many butterflies. Some flowers are lighting up the woods with bright yellow, a lovely sense of yellow, purple too. And small delicate white signs along the forest and fields floor.
I looked down the track for a distance and I could see all the signs of spring. Butterflies chasing each other in the warm afternoon sunlight, fluttering this way and that. Caterpillars climbing about the leaves, demolishing them as they go. Dragons darting about, taking rest in the last of the days sunlight. Ladybirds and ants climbing about the branches. Spiders, running and hunting.
So many little creatures, characters of the Earth’s intelligence. And flowers, aspects of the Earths beauty. Seeding silk grasses blowing wildly in the wind suggesting a new dawn.
In this ancient land the ‘seasons’ are all variations on summer.
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The other night I heard a disturbance played out on the wooden floorboards upstairs, a shouting, the sound of things falling and footsteps I didn’t recognise. I went up to see what was happening and found an alarmed human, a stricken cat that I was told had jumped four feet in the air off the bed – sensing something strange in the darkness of the night, and a possum looking a bit lost. Instead of presence, it seems, everybody took fright.
Until recently the back door upstairs had been left open for the cat to come and go. With the recent cooling and windy weather it had been closed. The possum that lives in the roof got hungry and broke through the flyscreen on the kitchen window but didn’t remember to go out that way and ended up in the bedroom where the cat sleeps.
When I got there and turned on the light the possum was wandering about the kitchen floor looking for a way out so I herded him towards the door and up the veranda post he went to the ceiling, cool as a cucumber. There I got a picture of him and he didn’t seem to mind at all, he only wanted to get away from the trouble and calm down.
So that’s where the cat food had been going. The habit of hunger satisfied drove him in. A habit to be broken.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Nature's Place 
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