I can’t believe it has taken me almost two years to photograph a Brushtail Possum!  In urban areas, possums can be a pest, often living in the roof space of houses and feeding on prized garden plants.  Here, we never see them because they have their natural habitat and don’t really need to come near the house.

By pure chance, Richard saw this one on the bird feeder while bringing in some firewood tonight.  The photos are blurry, but will give you some idea of the size (about the size of a rabbit) and colouring.

Brushtail possums, when in their natural environment, live in tree hollows or hollow logs, often having several dens over a home range.  These nocturnal creatures are solitary by nature and feed on a range of plants and insects.  In our case tonight, on birdseed!

Hopefully I’ll see another possum before the next two years go by, and I’ll try to get some better photographs.  I didn’t have long to experiment tonight. As we were watching, the possum took off and climbed the trunk of the nearest tree.