Wednesday 23rd October, 2024

We’d arrived before dusk, so as to have enough time to walk around the surrounding area of the release site where we’d initially collected Juniper* and her three berry-joeys the other day. Now that she was rested, her nose returned to a healthy pink, and she and her joeys had been examined by the Wildlife Victoria vets and given the green light, it was time to get the family back to their home, before someone else moved in. The residential area was pleasingly, reassuringly full of possum food trees, and there was a small park replete with a native garden. We spotted trees that had their crowns evenly nibbled, and a fence line that meant that with relative, late-night ease, were you a possum, you could get to the lower, lush plantings. This has been one of the loveliest parts of wildlife care: seeing a new world open, a parallel universe, almost, before your eyes, as you look for signs of where a possum would go, and what would they eat. We look at the connecting canopies, the overhead powerlines, the means of getting from place to place in the arboreal world. Above our heads, another landscape. Side by side, a secret world we could easily miss if we failed to read the signs.

As we waited for it to get darker, and the tennis court to empty, we heard before we saw, a magpie fledgling calling for their food. He or she was near to the bins, and when a dog walker came near, they’d scuttle to the alcove between the two bins. In this passageway, they were largely undetected. We couldn’t see the parents nearby, but about 15-minutes later we heard one overhead, and in response to their call, the little fledgling dipped under the gate to the children’s park where ‘no dogs allowed’. The same part of the park we had earmarked as a good release site for Juniper. In the safe and quiet, the fledgling ‘went to bed’, under the watchful though, to us, unseen eye of their parents, and we made our way to the large paperbark tree whose canopy was so plentiful it connected to a larger still Morton Bay fig in someone’s back garden, and several different species of gumtree. The perfect place to drop Juniper home, right next to the house she’d been found in (in the side atrium), and where the family knew her movements. 

What could possibly go wrong?

Juniper had eaten well on the drive over, and the pouch felt warm with rest. We scooped the little family up from the pink travel basket, all four nestled in their pouch. With the berries tightly gripping on to her back, they were but a zip up the wide branches to home. But as Juniper, who went from munching languidly on some browse to go took off, she shook all three joeys loose. She headed to the high canopy, far beyond reach, before pausing to look back from the fluffy cloud of the paperbark, like the moment in Ratatouille when Remy is released from the glass jar on the banks of the Seine. Backlit by the glow of the local tennis courts, the moment, though devastating, was utterly filmic. From there she headed up to the tree-highway that lead to the established fig, and we listened to her movements. Would she come back? How could we get her joeys to her now? Why hadn’t we put up a nest box and then popped the family, in a pouch, inside it!? How could we fix our disaster!? What had we done!?

We scooped up all three joeys and popped them in the pouch, and as Louise raced around to the lane so as to be able to hold the pouch up to the trunk of fig visible over the fence, a microbat sped past my face and into the back garden. Juniper’s world was a rich one, but it was without her joeys! We heard her head further into the garden of the dark property, and occasionally she’d head back in our direction to where we stood, Louise by the base of the fig and me by the paperbark, hedging our bets. We’d learned the hard way that such a release is fraught. Next time, a nest box, though even with that, there is still the chance she’ll abandon her babies in the excitement and adrenaline of the return, and all the things we as humans can not know. 

Several hours later, from the car, we saw Juniper scuttle across the top of the fence line of the neighbouring property. Even at this distance, she made a perfect silhouette, lit by the warm glow of the large windows behind her. The film evidently not over yet. Louise dashed over, pouch of little ones to her chest, and saw, eye to eye, Juniper in the tree and she was not alone, but with her partner. The two ringtails reunited, they ‘sat’, backlit, munching away. Into this human-read scene of possum date night, Louise held the pouch, open like a nest, level with the fence for Juniper to come and retrieve her joeys. In such close and extended proximity (under a metre), Juniper looked at her joeys several times and then turned away and kept munching, her mate further up the tree, utterly unfazed and not engaging with the joeys nor Louise. ‘Juniper, here are your babies. Come and get them.’ The two adult ringtails kept eating. ‘Juniper? Do you want your babies? Please take your babies.’ And then, after a long pause, ‘Juniper, do you want us to look after your babies?’ Another long pause. ‘Are you sure you want us to look after your babies?’ At length, after promising to take good care of them, it seemed this release was going to go in a direction we’d not foreseen. The adult ringtails slowly headed off into the night, their two silhouettes backlit by the window-screen. They disappeared out of frame, and the bright light was dimmed as if on cue. And that is how we returned Juniper to her home and her mate, and how we ended up with three extra joeys to raise for six-months.

(NB: While Juniper had been in our care, so as not to interfere, we had nothing to do with her joeys, beyond their initial examination, WV vet check, and sighting them as we cleaned the enclosure in the mornings. Today, having weighed them, the smallest is 75 grams, and the biggest is 92 grams. They’d all put on between 6 to 8 grams from their mother’s milk, while in our care for the tiniest possible stay. Juniper weighed over 900 grams. Her responsibility, her every part of her glorious wild self, is to survive. She can breed again and her body was tired and her joeys big. And though we can only speak a little ringtail, we are sure she decided her joeys were in a good place.)

While this was not the outcome we’d hoped for, it is not the worst. Everyone is safe. The joeys didn’t climb up into the tree, out of our reach. Juniper had plenty of chances to safely retrieve her joeys, so our sense of devastation at her loss, caused by us, was followed, eventually, by one of humour, as together Juniper and her mate, peacefully threaded their way into the night, all but tail in tail. 

* Juniper was a rescue case we attended for a ringtail possum with a bub on board, caught in an atrium, called in to Wildlife Victoria (WV). We spotted the case still up on the WV portal and thought we could lend a paw to her.

The image component of our artists’ book, Restoring corridors, is currently on display at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, as part of the 2024 National Works on Paper exhibition.

2024 National Works on Paper
Until Sunday 24th November, 2024
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
Civic Reserve, Dunns Road, Mornington, Victoria
11am–4pm, Tuesday–Sunday
(Closed public holidays)

Vote for your favourite work in the 2024 National Works on Paper People’s Choice Award

Image credit: Detail of Juniperus communis L. (title on object), from Sebastian Kneipp’s Atlas végétal des plantes médicinales citées dans Ma cure d'eau, photomechanical print, c. 1884 – in or before 1894