The fun of living on a farm, surrounded by bushland.
Birds singing, kangaroo’s hopping through the paddock….
…galah’s & cockatoo’s stealing all the ducks tucker, wombats digging holes under the fences and letting foxes through to get your chooks, monitors stealing eggs and eviscerating your waterfowl, feral goats breaking down fences to get at your nanny’s. Oh it’s heavenly.
And then, a possum decided the ceiling of the farmhouse is a great place to settle down to raise some babies.
Bloody possums! For the most part I don’t mind them, they do the occasional screeching at night or steal some of the poultries wheat, but they are tolerable. Until they decide your bloody home should be their bloody home!
We had one recently, it found a gap between the roof tiles and the guttering and decided to move in. Not just move in, but in the ceiling space right above our bed! We could hear it skittering and growling and scratching and gnawing and generally being a pain in the arse during the nighttime hours. Not only was it causing damage, but keeping us awake. I was tempted to go up there with my shotgun but I didn’t want to blow a hole in our damn roof.
So I found out the best ways to get rid of them, and it worked a treat! So here’s Big Farmer Trev’s top tips for getting rid of possums out of your ceiling.
Tip #1 Lights
Possums are nocturnal creatures, so the perpetually dark ceiling cavity of your home is the perfect place for them to take up residence. You can spoil this for them by sticking up some lights. Make sure they are safe lantern’s that produce no head, the last thing you want is the possum to knock one over and start a damn fire.
Leaving these lamps up there for two to three days constantly lit will drive the possum barmy. Instead of it being constantly dark it will be constantly light and it will want to find a new home.
Tip #2 Smells
Possums have got a very sensitive sense of smell, and do not like to hang around where odours that smell awful to them perpetuate. Garlic is good, so are peeled onions. Cloves work well as you can spread them like buckshot. But what I found best was mothballs. Not only do these smell stronger that the garlic or onions, but the beauty is you can fling them around your ceiling cavity without having to worry about removing them later. You don’t want to have to go crawling through your ceiling cavity to remove peeled onions before they start to rot.
Tip #3 – Entrapment
Now in NSW where I am located, you need to get permission to catch a possum, but thankfully that’s not hard to get. And usually the powers that be will also hire to you a cage specific to the purpose. You can either place this in your ceiling cavity, or else place it outside near where the possum is getting in and out. If placing it in your ceiling cavity, make sure you aren’t putting it near your lanterns and mothballs, or the possum isn’t going to go near it, no matter what yummy treats you place inside.
Once you catch the possum, choose a tree that’s far from the house but still in its established territory, then release it. Hopefully it’s going to like the tree a lot more than your house and decide to live there instead.
There are lots of other tips I’ve read online, but I’ve found using the above makes all the others superfluous. Simply put some lanterns and mothballs in your ceiling, then bait a cage so you can catch it and move it to a tree further away from your house – problem solved! And don’t forget to plug up the hole it used to find its way in, just in case it doesn’t like it’s new tree and decides to giving living above your bed another go.