Australia & New Zealand : New Zealand: Possum hunter hits the trail and goes with the Flo
on 2008/4/1 13:26:04 (8 reads)

For most hunters, disappearing into the bush with their dog is a treat to look forward to at the end of their working week. Anne Hardie talks with one hunter who has turned hunting into his career.

Paul Fleming bought his first 10-speed bike on the proceeds of his possum hunting when he was still at school, setting traps for them in the bush near Pakawau in Golden Bay.

At night, he would head out to set the traps and before school each morning, even at primary-school age, he'd head back into the bush to check them and bring the catch home.

Decades later, he's still scouring the hills for the furry beasts and making a living from their skins and fur. These days he doesn't fetch $30 a skin as he did in his school days, but fur pays well with a kilogram returning $105. That's about 10 or 12 winter-clad possums or about 15 in summer.

Fleming is an agent for Basically Bush, which buys and promotes possum products, so to source enough possum skins and fur he deals with about 60 other hunters who cover an area stretching from Haast on the West Coast through to the remote hinterland of Golden Bay.

Farmers with too little time to control possums supply Fleming with poison to come on to their properties and lay the bait and hunt the furry critters that are known to spread tuberculosis. Forestry owners also consider them a pest as they nip shoots off young trees and Fleming gets permits to hunt in many of the region's forests.

Fur is baled and freighted to Wellington where it will be blended and washed before being sold on to customers who will make it into a variety of products, mainly for the New Zealand tourist trade.

"We're the only country legally allowed to kill them because they're not native here," says Fleming. "Some of our product will go to Australia even though they have millions of possums there."

Between the Government's 1080 drive and possum hunters, numbers have fallen dramatically over the last few years and Fleming suggests they may have dropped to about half the 70 million estimated to inhabit New Zealand.

He knows it's a lot harder for hunters to get good numbers of possums now. Five years ago, he used to bring 300kg of fur back from the coast each month but now it's down to 50 to 100kg. However, there's also more competition from other buyers now.

"I've got some guys who get 10kg (of fur) a week and that's about $1000. Then there's other guys not getting much at all. It all depends on the time they're putting into it and the area they're doing.

"The best I've ever done is about 300 possums a week but in the week just gone I've got about 90, and I've worked hard for that."

He's been in Golden Bay, where he heads every second week from his home in Stoke, along with his canine companion, Flo, who helps in the search for possum trails where he will lay bait or traps.

Usually, it's steep, rugged terrain covered in bush or forestry and he can cover several kilometres each day in the search for possums.

He knows the signs well; scratched earth among the pine needles at the base of a tree where possums have been playing and the telltale small trails leading through the grass that possums regularly pass.

"You've got to think like a possum. They're always playing over the end of a ridge or the edge of a creek because they don't like to get their feet wet."

On these trails, he lays a tempting morsel of icing sugar and raspberry jam in a tin to lure the possums into eating a foreign substance, before replacing it with cyanide bait or the capsule cyanide called Ferotox.

While 1080 has had a marked effect on possum numbers, Fleming is not a fan of it because of the length of time it takes to kill a possum and its effect on other wildlife, preferring the faster-acting cyanide poisons.

"Cyanide is instant, you seldom find them more than six feet from your bait or they're right beside the bait. 1080 can take up to 24 hours to kill a possum and sometimes longer."

Close to tracks, he often chooses traps, while it's easier to lug the lighter poison up hills.

He heads out at five or six in the morning, before hawks are in the air and scavenging the carcasses. Wild pigs will gladly make a meal of the possums too.

"Sometimes you arrive to find a pile of fur and nothing else."

Trapped possums are killed and plucked straight away when the fur just about falls off them, but if they're already dead from poison it's almost impossible to pluck them, so he skins them and will later paint a solution on to the skin to remove the fur. Whole carcasses can be put through a machine that removes the fur.

"I skin as I go and hang them on a rope over my shoulder. You can skin 80 to 100 a day if they're there. I can skin a possum in about half a minute, though it gets longer as the day goes on."

One of the biggest appeals of possum hunting is the landscape he traverses to capture them.

"I was down the edge of a massive tomo the other day and there was nikaus and ferns in it and fantails chasing all these sandflies. It was just beautiful. I got eight possums around the top of that tomo."

At the end of the day, he grabs the rifle and Flo and they head out spotlighting for more possums.

"I love spotlighting," he enthuses. "You find a possum in the light and Flo will follow it in the light and chase it up a tree. If it doesn't get to the tree in time, she gets it. She can catch a pig too."

Being a hunter means the occasional deer or goat is added to the bounty to take home, which means the family gets to eat game meat about four times a week and the freezer is always full.

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