By Ruth
As hiking and camping enthusiasts in Canada, one of the big concerns we have to deal with when heading out on an overnight trip is bears. There are strict protocols in place for how to cook and store your food in order to avoid attracting bears to your tent at night. If you’re at an organized backcountry campsite, there will usually be some infrastructure in place for this purpose; like bear-proof lockers or a pulley system to hang your food well above ground level. Sometimes, we head a bit further afield and have to rig up our own system using a tree, a stuff sack and some rope. All the diagrams you see for how to do this online show a perfect tree, with a nice strong branch extending perpendicularly from the trunk, where you can suspend your food bag high above the ground and a safe distance from the tree trunk, so in case the bear climbs up, it still won’t be able to reach your provisions. In reality though, this platonically ideal tree does not exist. We usually end up with a janky bear hang, a bit too low and close to surrounding tree trunks. In the morning, there is a small moment of relief when we see the food is still there.
Now that we are in New Zealand, we don’t have to worry about bears at all. It is a big mindset shift which has left us with the question: if we don’t have to make a bear hang, what should we do with our food at night? But it seems our days of stashing or hanging food are not quite behind us, because here there is another type of wildlife that we have been warned about on several occasions: possums. They are apparently aggressive and will go after your food if you leave it unattended. So while there is less threat to life and limb from these creatures, we will still want to make sure our food is safe from their little marsupial paws, and hanging is a good way to do that.
While I was adequately warned about possums before coming here, I didn’t expect to see any possums this early in our trip. But while we are still in Auckland, they have been popping up everywhere.
This newspaper article:
This shop window:
These local New Zealand wool blend yarns (yes, we did take the opportunity to have a look around a local yarn store):
It seems as though there is a full-on anti-possum war being waged down here, and no one is talking about it.