The Day of the Dead Opossum

Hello from Liz!

Yesterday afternoon after we'd finished an incredibly long morning of cleaning at Centabay (nearly every room had been vacated, meaning dozens of beds that needed to be changed and bathrooms that needed to be scrubbed), Jen and I laced up our hiking boots, stuffed some sliced cheese and apples into my backpack, and struck out down School Rd. It was hot and sunny and it seemed like there were more flowers blooming than ever before.


(Intermission - Jen being cute in bed one morning.)

We took the Opua Forest track; it's about 5k one way. We had three hours until we needed to be back for work at the Swiss Cafe. The track goes what feels like straight up for the first twenty minutes of walking, and after that it's up and down and up and down and up and down, quite steeply. We were walking through what they call forest here and what I would call jungle - giant tree ferns and palms and Tarzan-worthy vines everywhere.

After about half an hour of steady walking and chatting, we rounded a bend and I stopped in my tracks.

"Look," I said to Jen. "A dead thing."

We went closer to investigate.

"What IS it?" Jen asked. It was a legitimate question. The thing was fat and furry and about the size of a cat, lying on its side directly in the middle of the trail with its eyes still open. It was grayish brown and had a long, curling black tail and scarily long claws and teeth. Flies were buzzing around, but there were no wounds and it was still odor-less.

"Maybe it was just old," Jen suggested, and after I'd poked it a couple of times with a stick (you can't just find a dead thing and NOT poke it with a stick) we continued on our way.

Five minutes later, we came across another one.

"What the crap," I said.

This one was just to the side of the trail, curled up with his little feet crossed beside a half-empty plastic cup that had been staked into the dirt. Being coolheaded scientists, Jen and I deduced that whatever these things were, the local government or park service must be poisoning them for some reason. And whatever the poison was, it was extremely fast-acting, because this thing had NOT gotten far.

"Maybe they're mongooses!" I said. "I don't know what mongooses look like, but I think they're pests in a lot of places."

"I always thought mongooses lived in Mongolia," Jen said.

I gave her a look. "I'm sticking with my theory."

We carried on hiking for maybe two miles, and in that time we saw nineteen more dead critters for a whopping total of twenty-one before we turned around. One was a tiny baby clinging to its mother. Sometimes there were three or four all in the same place, curled around the same cup. Each one we found was only a foot or two from the cup of poison. Whatever it was, it killed almost instantly. The dead things had maggots curling through their eyes and flies buzzing in and out of their mouths. Some of them had been ripped open, with their intestines lying beside them in the moss.

It was a really lovely hike. Luckily, we found a dead-thing-free zone to eat our cheese and apples in.

When we got back to the hostel a couple hours later, one of the English guys staying upstairs asked us how the hike went.

"Great!" we said. "We saw lots of dead things!"

"Eh? What were they?"

"About yay big...giant ears...grayish brown...long tail..."

"Ah, sounds loik a possum."

"Definitely not," Jen said. "We know what possums look like."

"Well, it had big ears? Wos it a rabbit?"

I gave this guy a look. "It was NOT a rabbit."

This weird guy who is living in his van in the driveway came strolling over, and Jen got out her camera to show him a photo of the thing, because while weird, he is also an expert on a lot of strange things. He peered at the photo.

"Yep, that's a possum."

Apparently, what they call possums here are not what we call possums at home. They were brought in two hundred years ago for the fur trade, and they've finally started to take over. There are more than seventy million of them in NZ now, which, given the country's total HUMAN population of about four million, is a little scary. They eat kiwi bird eggs and tons of vegetation every night, so the local governments are trying to kill them all.

In some towns, they apparently wrangle elementary school children into the cause; during some school days they have field trips in which the kids try to find the traps and then bring the dead possums back - they get a few bucks for each one. I certainly never got to do anything that cool when I was little. :)

And that, my friends, was the day of the dead possums. We're just revving up for Halloween.


(The wharf in Paihia, and our other Centabay girls at breakfast.)