Up under the eave on the western side of a Figtree house, where the fascia had dropped about forty millimetres away from the last rafter, there was a smear of greasy brown polish on the timber roughly the width of my palm. Fur grease. Something had been squeezing through that same gap twice a night for long enough to wax it.
Inside the roof void the batts were flattened into a shallow bowl in one corner, and the plasterboard under it had gone the colour of weak tea. The owner had rung me about rats.
It wasn't rats. It was a brushtail, and by the time I'd got down the ladder she'd already asked the question everyone asks, which is how soon can you take it away and let it go up in the bush somewhere.
The short version of the law
You can't. Not legally, and honestly not usefully either.
Possums are protected in NSW under the Biodiversity Conservation Act. You can't harm one, you can't poison one, and you can't load it into the ute and drop it off at a reserve on the way home. Doing that carries real penalties, and the fine print catches people who think they're being kind.
There is a licence for catching and releasing, and it's narrower than most people expect. If you get one as the homeowner, the possum has to go back on the property it came from: released at dusk, no more than 150 metres from where it was caught, next to something it can climb straight up. The NSW rules on catch and release possum licences spell it out, and there's a plain-language page on how to remove a possum from your roof worth reading before you do anything.
So the trap-and-drive-away plan is out. Which sounds like bad news until you understand why the rule exists.
Relocation doesn't work anyway
Brushtails hold territory. Drop one into bushland at Mount Keira and it lands in the middle of somebody else's patch, with no idea where the water is, no idea where the den trees are, and a resident possum that will absolutely see it off. Most relocated possums are dead inside a few weeks. The ones that survive tend to walk a long way looking for a roof, because a roof is what they were living in.
And here's the part that actually matters for your ceiling: the hole is still open. Take one possum out of a roof with a working entry point and the void doesn't stay empty. There's another possum within a couple of hundred metres of your house right now, and the vacancy is advertised.
The animal was never the problem. The gap in the fascia was.
Rat or possum
Worth being sure before you spend money on the wrong job, because I've been called out for both and the fix is completely different.
A rat scurries. Quick, light, continuous, and it'll run the same beam back and forth all night. A possum walks. You get heavy, deliberate thumps, sometimes a proper crash as it lands off a branch onto the tiles, and it's mostly around dusk when it leaves and again in the small hours when it comes home. If you hear it going out at nightfall and coming back before dawn, that's a possum on a schedule.
Then there's the noise they make at each other, which people describe as a growl or a hiss or, more than once to me, as something being murdered in the ceiling. Brushtails are loud and they argue.
Droppings settle it. Possum scat is the size of a small olive, dark, often a bit fibrous with leaf. Rat droppings are grain-sized and there are hundreds of them. And a possum in a roof leaves a urine stain on the ceiling that a rat generally won't, because they use one corner and they're bigger.
How the roof actually gets shut
The method that works is the same every time and it isn't complicated. Find the entry, let the animal leave of its own accord, then close it behind them.
You find the entry by looking for what I found in Figtree: the polished rub mark, fur caught on a nail head or a bit of torn sarking, scratching on the fascia, flattened moss on the tiles. Then you fit a one-way door over that opening so it can get out at dusk and can't get back in. Give it a couple of nights, check nothing's still using it, and then seal it properly.
Properly means capping the gap where the fascia meets the gutter, replacing broken tile vents and whirlybird flashings, screening the gable vents, and packing out the spot where a tile has lifted over a valley. Then you cut back anything that gets them onto the roof. A brushtail will make a jump of a metre or so without thinking about it, so a branch two metres clear of the gutter is fine, a branch brushing the eave is a ladder. Fences and washing lines running to the wall count too.
If you're putting a nest box up in a tree in the same yard, do it before you close the roof rather than after, so there's somewhere to go on night one.
The one thing not to do is block the hole while you're still hearing movement. Seal a possum in and you'll be cutting your ceiling open in a week, and if it's a female carrying a dependent joey you'll be doing it for a much worse reason.
Where we come into it
We don't do possum catch-and-release. It's a separate licence and it's not our trade, so if you need the animal handled you want a licensed catch-and-release operator or, in some cases, a licence issued to you directly by the local National Parks office.
What we do get called for is everything the possum was pointing at. Nine times out of ten the roof that lets a possum in is already letting rats in through the smaller holes, and that's the rodent control side of things. Same ladder, same eaves, same list of gaps I go through in rodent-proofing an older Illawarra home. If your place is around Figtree, Mount Kembla, Austinmer or anywhere else backing onto the escarpment you've got both animals in the trees behind you, and they're using the same front door.
Whoever ends up applying any chemical on your property needs a current pest management technician licence from the NSW EPA, and you're entitled to ask to see it. Nothing about possums involves chemicals, but the rodent job usually does.
Do the roof in August, not September
Right now, at the tail of winter, is the easy window. It's cool enough to be up in a roof void without cooking, the trees are easy to see through, and the possums are settled rather than moving.
From September that changes. Brushtails have a spring breeding run, so you get more chasing across the tiles, more of that growling at two in the morning, and more young animals coming off their mothers and going looking for a roof of their own. Every one of them is checking your fascia line. Add a joey riding on a back somewhere in the void and the whole job gets slower, because now you're waiting on an animal that can't leave yet.
Get the gaps mapped and closed while it's still cold and the spring lot go and bother someone else. If you want a second set of eyes on the roofline, or you're hearing something up there and you're not sure what it is, give us a ring and we'll tell you straight which animal you've got and whether it's ours to deal with. You can also check where we work across the Illawarra first.
Need a hand with this in your home? Get a free quote or call 0430 007 651.