Opossum: Western hemisphere marsupial (ugly)
Possum: Marsupial native to Australia (cute)
Apparently, the thing to do if you are a possum is to find a way into the attic space of a house and set up shop.
Step 1: climb across to the roof on a power line or fling yourself on the roof from a tree branch.
Step 2: find hole through the exterior cladding into the roof space
Step 3: scamper across the ceiling at all hours of the night and make scratching noises
Step 4: ???
Step 5: profit
This house and our previous house have had possums living above us and I really don't mind them most of the time. I like to imagine the possom equivalent of Anne Frank writing memoirs about living in the same house as us.
A few weeks ago, we went to the Ekka (the Queensland equivalent of a state fair) and saw a reptile show. They pulled out a six foot long carpet python and informed us that they are commonly found living in the roof space of houses.
Apparently, the thing to do if you are a python is to find an attic with a family of possums and clean house.
Earlier in the week, Mary was chatting with a few moms at Cole's preschool and discovered that there are two pythons living above the classroom and they occasionally sun themselves on the roof. One of them had a suspicious looking bump along its length. The other moms, native to Brisbane, started reminiscing about various places they have lived where there were snakes living in the attic. The general consensus is that snakes are preferred over possums.
This got me thinking about two things:
1. If I was a snake, the perfect place for me to live would be near a continually renewable supply of plump, uncoordinated, oblivious children with apathetic caretakers.
2. Nobody at the school has considered calling a pest removalist.
[Edit: after reading this, my wife informed me that a removalist has been called. But that they are taking their sweet time getting around to evicting the snakes. I was also telling someone at church this morning about the pythons and his reply was: "They aren't really big enough to carry one of the children away, are they? So what are you worrying about?"]
*thank you Wikipedia for the possum pictures
3 comments:
what you need is a parcel tongue who can have a little chat with the snake and make sure his intentions are pure and honorable. then you have nothing to worry about :)
and to think...we're worried about the big spider we just caught in the basement... perspective is everything, i suppose!
Digging the parcel tongue option... that's definitely the best bet.
As Kim said, we found a rather large spider the other day, but beyond that we've got some pretty creepy pill bugs :)
I'm not sure about python, but i have a couple of recipes for possum.....
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