A visit from a possum

Our garden's a wasteland at the moment - mostly neglect, but also a number of plants have been eaten right down to the ground.  We think this fellow (and one or more companions/rivals) are the culprits for that:

possum on the fence out our kitchen window last week

So we borrowed a trap off a friend, and on Friday morning woke up to this:

Closer inspection revealed our possum was a mum with a joey in her pouch: Mum was thoroughly dead, but joey was still very much alive.  What to do?

Drowning was the most humane/quickest method we could think of - and as the joey wasn't coming out of the pouch, they went into the bucket together.

I had hoped to eat at least the back legs of the possum (it seems wrong to waste meat and possum is rather nice, although all but the back legs is full of quite small bones) but that was not to be.  Martin was off to an overnight meeting on Friday and left the bucket where I couldn't reach it, and neither of us were keen on meat that had been left in a bucket of water for several days!  So it was buried underneath the rhubarb it (or another possum) had killed: it should be good fertiliser for the replacement plant once we get one, and seemed kind-of poetic.

In more obviously positive news, I've been greatly enjoying all the piwakawaka (aka fantails) around our place at the moment.  I seem to see at least one every day, and it's lots of fun watching them flit about.

I've also been loving this self-sown viola that popped up a few weeks back:

 

The original flower is gone now, but hopefully there'll be more.  They're one of my favourite things :-)