Picture of Possum Plucking Paul

[Coote 5]

Here is my buddy Paul. He is the local agent for a company called Basically Bush Ltd... and in this capacity he buys possum fibre and pelts from around the top of the South Island of New Zealand. He also hunts for his own possum fur and provides a private pest control service. He is an expert.

 

Possum fur is currently being bought for NZ$70 per kilo, with anything from 12 to 18 possums being required to get a kilo. Good pelts are worth around NZ$10, but not all skins are good ones.

 

Paul might handle 500kg of plucked fur in a good month.

 

The fur is easily hand-plucked from a freshly killed warm possum. Machines have been developed to help with the plucking.... the fur that Paul is holding in the picture has been machine plucked. Hand-plucked fur looks more natural.

 

Paul gets most of his possums with cyanide, but he also traps and shoots them.

 

 

It's a pity you cant see it in the photo, but his number plate reads: POSUUM. His wife's plate reads: MRSPOS (or something like it).

[steamingutpiles 117]

Yep. He sure looks like a possum plucker.................We used to have'em down in Tasmainia but they locked 'em all up.................

[Guest Ditch_Shitter]

How does he use the cyanide, mate? Like, over here we used to use it for putting down holes. Powder form. Moisture in the air down there released the gas.

 

Only I imagined possums living in holes in trees and such. And would have thought even burrows, in your part of the world, might still be a bit dry.

 

What's the craic there then?

[Coote 5]

I have never used cyanide and I have had very little to do with it. However here is what I think I know.

 

We have sodium cyanide and potassium cyanide. I don’t know what differences are between the two compounds, but I am certain I wouldn’t want to have either of them in my mouth.

 

In practical terms it seems that trappers have two main forms of cyanide that they use. One is a paste which I believe comes in a tube. The other is in the form of little pills coated with a tasty bait compound. The trade name given to a common brand of these pills is Feratox. I understand that these pills are quite expensive… ranging from about NZ$0.33 to NZ$0.85 EACH depending on who you buy them from.

 

Cyanide may have been thrown down rabbit burrows at one stage in NZ, but it seems that when it comes to possums, the trappers encourage the animals to eat it.

 

The paste can be mixed with your own favourite bait. But you have to be very careful in handling this stuff.

 

The pills can simply be left in a suitable place for the possums to chance upon. The pills seem safer to handle.

 

What Paul often does is set up feeding stations in his trapping area. He leaves tasty tucker at these stations for the possums to start visiting on a regular basis. The possums get used to it, and it could be argued that the activity of the local possums could stimulate interest from further afield. Then just when the animals are getting used to eating a free lunch, Paul drops a handful of Feratox pills into the feed. It wouldn’t be unusual to find half a dozen dead possums at a bait station after the first hit.

 

I believe that any cyanide left behind in the forest breaks down fairly quickly. Feratox is said to become harmless after about ten days on the forest floor.

 

It is possible that possums can become poison shy. Perhaps some don’t get a big enough dose to die… perhaps some don’t eat the stuff at all because they have seen what happened to their cousins at the bait station. So poisoning can be followed up with trapping.

 

Yep…. Possums don’t generally live in burrows as a rule and I certainly doubt that they would dig one. However they will climb into all sorts of dark cosy places for shelter. It is believed that they prefer not to live in very wet places, although they can be abundant in regions that get a relatively high rainfall.

 

Paul sometimes brings possums home by the trailer load. Fortunately he can skin maybe fifty in an hour when he is really motoring. Lesser mortals like me would probably only be able to do 10 or 15 in an hour.

 

The trouble with poisoning is that the possums are dead, cold and stiff when you pick them up. A warm possum can be plucked in about two or three minutes… but a cold one is hell of a hard to pluck. Paul has a machine that does a reasonable job of plucking, but often he seems to choose to skin the possums instead. He can then see if there are any good skins to keep as pelts (worth maybe NZ$10). If they are only good for their fibre, he then applies a special chemical to the skin which loosens the fur so it comes out easily…. They call this process “sliping†(sly-ping).

 

I would love to trap possums to sell them for meat. Unfortunately there are so many rules governing the killing and processing of meat that it makes it far too difficult for me. I guess if somebody wanted to set up a (very expensive) processing facility nearby it might be feasible. Meanwhile I keep the best ones to eat myself (which is quite legal I believe, and I would probably still do it if it wasn’t). The other day I roasted a couple of them together. One tasted ok but it was tough. The other was absolutely heavenly….. and it nearly dropped off the bone like a young supermarket chicken, but without the added chemicals.

 

It has been estimated that we have a population of around 70 million possums in New Zealand…. And that they potentially eat around 20 thousand tonnes of vegetation a night between them. So the conservationists are keen to see them go. They are also accused of potentially carrying bovine turberculosis…. And of eating native insects and birds’eggs. But if every New Zealander developed a taste for them, and if everybody ate possum every day, they would be an endangered species before you knew it.

[Guest Ditch_Shitter]

We have sodium cyanide and potassium cyanide. I don’t know what differences are between the two compounds, but I am certain I wouldn’t want to have either of them in my mouth.

That hit the mark, Coote!

 

 

 

A common brand of these pills is Feratox.

' Ferret Tox(in) '? Am I remembering rightly that it's New Zealand which also has the scourge of feral Ferrets, mate? Blimey! Seems fair to assume then that .....

 

 

 

Well, and with that; I'm off to check my traps again. Had a light rain last night. I don't know where I got this idea from, but I'm convinced that, when the drains run, so do the mink .....

[Coote 5]

Yep... we have feral ferrets - and weasels and stoats.

 

Stoats are the ones that our conservationists seem to worry about the most, but I know they want to get rid of every last member of the polecat family.

 

NZ evidently had no native mammals other than bats and marine mammals when man first arrived here. But we had prolific and varied bird life.... but the stoats etc have changed things.

 

I don't see many ferrets and stoats etc, but I know they are around. The only one I have killed directly was a stupid one that ran down a track toward me when I had a bit of rope in my hand. I saw it coming and managed to clobber it by swinging the rope down hard. It stank.

[Guest craftycarper]

Here is my buddy Paul. He is the local agent for a company called Basically Bush Ltd... and in this capacity he buys possum fibre and pelts from around the top of the South Island of New Zealand. He also hunts for his own possum fur and provides a private pest control service. He is an expert.

 

Possum fur is currently being bought for NZ$70 per kilo, with anything from 12 to 18 possums being required to get a kilo. Good pelts are worth around NZ$10, but not all skins are good ones.

 

Paul might handle 500kg of plucked fur in a good month.

 

The fur is easily hand-plucked from a freshly killed warm possum. Machines have been developed to help with the plucking.... the fur that Paul is holding in the picture has been machine plucked. Hand-plucked fur looks more natural.

 

Paul gets most of his possums with cyanide, but he also traps and shoots them.

 

 

 

It's a pity you cant see it in the photo, but his number plate reads: POSUUM. His wife's plate reads: MRSPOS (or something like it).

blimey it's gordan ramsey, is he cooking em on the f word....

[IanB 0]

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