Member-only story
The elephant not in the room.
Hello Possum
A few years ago the late New Zealand architect Ian Attfield recalled the story of when he was redesigning the Wellington Museum, part of the brief was to display a stored 100-year-old stuffed elephant. To his surprise, this elephant was still urinating, however, upon closer inspection, he discovered a family of possums had taken up residence inside the elephant, and were relieving themselves through the elephant’s groin.
Possums are very cute, but when they take up residence in inappropriate places they can be a real pest. Besides the screeching at night, they make an enormous racket when they have triple jump races wearing hobnailed boots across my long flat roof. Sometimes I wonder if there is a herd of elephants up there.
A while back I would regularly wake in the middle of the night to a noise that sounded a lot like the trumpeting of an elephant. It was quite different from the sound of dogs howling, or cats (or neighbours for that matter) fighting or mating. In my half-sleep between dreaming and thinking, the only logical, albeit drowsy explanation seemed to be that it was some unusual possum call. As I would doze off with the Baby Elephant Walk song playing in my mind, I would make a mental note to google possum sounds, but never remembered.
