A Place to die

High in the fork of the balding cypress tree, in a record heat wave on January 30th at 3.00pm Melbourne daylight saving time, the female possum was invisible to the people below sheltering from the sun in its sparse shade.

The temperature was officially 43 degrees , but in Catani Gardens, St. Kilda, it beat down fiercely on the little brush tail possum at well over 50 degrees. It scorched her fur, quickly penetrated it, blistered her skin beneath and dangerously heated the core of her body. She had slept in the early hours of that day but awoke in distress as the sun rose higher, pounding her mercilessly . Almost against her own will, she descended the branches, and the trunk of her tree reaching the hot ground below. She entered a strange daytime world which she had never seen before.
At first everything looked white .
She could not see in the intense light as, being a creature of the night, her eyes were adapted to darkness . She was disoriented with the strange world she saw and her own heat exhaustion.

Desperately she sought relief.

She looked across an expanse of dead crackling lawn and lines of palm trees (one of whose crown she once lived in) that had been made inaccessible with wide steel bands around the trunks. Around the sea edge edge of this domain were thin interrupted stands of heroic but struggling mirror bush.

There was no cool place in Catani Gardens.

No water relieved the overwhelming burning heat. The occasional splashes and drops from 3 drinking fountains (miles away from her, on a small possum scale) dried immediately as they fell on the burning bricks of the guttering below .

The little possum could find no relief from the intolerable heat. Groups of people laughed and chatted or lay on their beach towels in the shade of every cypress tree.
She could not go there. She must not be seen.

Humans had even staked out most of the pathetic alcoves in the mirror bush where ring tail possums have been seen occasionally at night.

The little possum had no choice. She lay down in the few inches of shade- too little for any human to shelter in -at the base of a palm tree.

She curled herself around the curve of the trunk so as not to be noticed by passing humans or dogs and waited for the end.

It came quickly.

See also: "Victorian Government shows no mercy for fauna and flora in Melbourne's heatwave" of 30 Jan 09.