2 Texans Down Under

When you’re new in a country, as we are here in Australia, lessons can come from any direction. Even from the trees or a power line, as is the case when you look up and finally get to link a bird call you’ve been hearing for months with the type of bird that makes it.

Suddenly you know a tiny bit more about the neighborhood. I have learned to recognize the call of a Fig Bird.

Another thing I learned today came from our friend Peter. He told me the house for sale for $780,000 on the back or park side of our block used to belong to an elderly woman who could put two fingers in her mouth and whistle loud enough to cause a taxi driver to stop on a street 50 meters away.

That, it turns out, is as far as you can legally move an Australian possum.

This new information came from my reading Jane Fraser’s column in the “Weekend Australian,” and it confirmed for me the wisdom of my decision last week to spend $60 for wire mesh that I have now unrolled and attached to a section of trellis over the patio of our small house.

For a couple of months now, my bougainvillea plants have been doing their damnest to grow up to the boards of that trellis in order to proceed across them and fulfill their purpose in life by providing us with shade and beautiful blossoms.

Somehow, though, no green was getting much above the patio wall a couple of feet below the trellis. Why? Because the new, tender shoots at the growing ends of my bougainvilleas were neatly nibbled off.

Neighborhood possums use our fence tops as a highway at night. They don’t touch mature bougainvillea leaves and I’ve never seen one of them actually nibbling the new green, but I did espy possum droppings on the wall, right below the scene of the crimes against our vegetation. Felony convictions have hinged on less.

I toyed with the idea of capital punishment only briefly and it’s just as well that I didn’t pursue my second idea about entrapment, about catch and release.

Jane Fraser wrote that she did call a “possum man.” From him she learned that, even if you catch a possum with the intent of finding it a better home, it’s against the law to move it more than 50m before releasing it. That’s no farther than some women can whistle down a taxi.

“So what’s the point?” Fraser asked. “Might as well just leave them to eat the flora and be done with it.”

No way, I decided. I bought two rolls of mesh and, with Kristi’s help, tacked into place an envelope of wire to keep our flora from continuing to be a possum salad bar.

Unsightly? Yes, probably, to the eyes of others. But to my eyes it’s a thing of beauty because it has stopped all tip-munching. Healthy new shoots are now racing at full plant speed toward our trellis.

If a house that needs work on the back side of our block — well, okay, the front side; we’re probably on the back side — is worth well over three-quarters of a million dollars, then my mesh-enshrouded bougainvillea must be worth a lot more than the $60 I’ve invested in its protection.

And the value of knowing that I’ve thwarted the intent of a possum with plenty of other food options all around, a four-legged, fuzzy-tailed creature that may have more legal rights in some ways than I do?

Well, to quote a TV ad for a credit card: priceless!