What's going on at night?

A new tool will help us find out

August 2025

There are already a few great mysteries in this garden. The first is what on earth keeps pooing on our lawn? Another is what is eating the possum lure out of the possum trap without setting the trap off? Another is what made the scratch marks on the fence?

All these unknowns and more will hopefully be answered with my new toy, sorry, tool. Years after my first one was stolen, I've saved enough money to buy a new trail camera. These are primarily designed for hunters to identify what future trophies are in a particular area. They are also used by scientists to monitor and track wildlife. Knowing that possums can be disturbed by a glowing red light, I've chosen a no-glow Browning Spec Ops Elite HP5, which is an incredibly testosterone-fuelled name for something this woman is going to use to detect rodents in her backyard. Anyway, I'm trying the different settings at the moment and whilst it detected me re-baiting the possum trap one morning, it also picked up the rat I caught in the rat trap before its demise.

What's useful about this is that I have placed the trap tunnel along the fence line and put branches down to help funnel rats into it. However, this is showing that the rat actually ran along the top of the fence before going down to the trap.

I'm used to catching mostly Norway rats, which are the beefy, ugly rats that scare New York cats and can swim well. However, here I catch mostly ship rats, the great climbers, so having the trap on the ground may not be the best option. The rat also appeared on the fence where there are scratch marks, which gives me a new idea about what made them (I was thinking cat or possum before this photo).

The trail camera is already helping answer the great mysteries of the garden and hopefully we'll uncover a few more surprises about what is going on when we are not around.