Poor possum & the wired up WIRES lady

This poor fellow was sighted recently in a nearby street. He was rather badly inured, and seemed to have been in a fight, maybe with a cat or a dog.

He was a ring tailed possum, he was looking very sorry for himself, and was dragging his injured limbs around on the grass verge.

"What can we do? What can we do?" I was asked. "This is a case for WIRES" I responded confidently.

WIRES stands for Wildlife Information Rescue & Education Service. It's a very fine organisation, with over 2000 volunteers within its NSW branch. Its mission statement is:

Mission Statement

WIRES aims to actively rehabilitate and preserve Australian wildlife and inspire others to do the same

which sounds good to me.

As a temporary measure we put a cardboard box over our patient, to immobilise him, then we waited for the cavalry to arrive.

Enter WIRES volunteer Sandra, always at the ready. She'd been on her way to work when she got our call, but her higher duty prevailed, and within minutes she'd returned home, collected her kit and caboodle - special possum cage, special possum handling blanket no doubt - and here she was striding purposefully up, transferring patient to the possum ambulance, and heading off to the possum-friendly vet. She carefully noted the exact location, so the volunteer possum-friendly vet could return it to its home turf once it was fully recovered. Then Sandra headed off to her other work. A very impressive operation all round.

 

Naturally we inquired later as to the health of our possum. Maybe we  could even witness its return to the wild? "It died", she told us. "It had too many internal injuries". I guess it's often like that.