Backyard Wildlife · Special Report

Nowhere Cool Left to Sleep: Why an Old Peninsula Orchardist's Pine Boxes May Be the Ringtail's Last Hope of Rescue Before Summer

Almost every Australian has heard a possum on the roof. Far fewer know that the ringtail in your eaves and the ringtails that dropped out of the trees at Somers in 2024 are the same problem, with a date on it: the first forty-degree day. Keith Hendry, 76, has spent 30 summers in his father's old packing shed in Red Hill finding out where ringtails actually sleep, and what happens to those places in the heat. This is his last spring at the bench. What he wrote down is worth more than the boxes he built.

First Light in Red Hill: A Shed That Still Smells of Apples

The workshop is the old packing shed at the bottom of what used to be the orchard, weatherboard on three sides and corrugated iron on the fourth, barely bigger than a double garage. His father's pruning saw hangs on the back wall, its handle worn into the shape of somebody else's grip. On the bench sits a row of pale pine boards, cut, planed and stacked by the same pair of hands. Keith Hendry, 76, does not look up. He is working a rasp around the inside of a round doorway no wider than the palm of his hand. He has been doing this since 1996.

"It isn't stopping that bothers me," he says, still not looking up. "It's what I don't see any more. When I was a boy you'd walk the windbreak after tea with a torch and count the eyes. Twenty, some nights. Twenty. I stood at the back fence for an hour last November. Two."

What Everyone Knows About Possums, and the Bit Nobody Mentions

You don't need telling that possums get into houses. Half the country has lain awake at 3am listening to something that sounds like a man in work boots crossing the ceiling. What hasn't been in the papers is why, and what happens to the smaller of our two backyard possums, the ringtail, in one particular garden on one particular weekend in summer. That is what Keith has spent 30 years writing down.

"Everybody blames the possum," he says. "The possum didn't cut the tree down."

The year before that last figure, it was 9,234. "Go and look at a new estate," Keith says. "Big house, small block, a lawn and a Colorbond fence. Not a hollow in a mile of it. You haven't got a hundred little homes any more. You've got a hundred roofs."

His father, Alf Hendry, grew apples on this ridge from 1952 until the year he died, and he did one thing his neighbours thought was soft in the head. When everyone else along the road cleared their paddock edges for more fruit trees, and later for house blocks, Alf left the old manna gum standing at the top of the orchard. Hollow in three places. The family called it the possum tree.

Alf died in 1995. The family kept the house block and the packing shed at the bottom of the hill; the orchard above it was sold the following winter. The manna gum came down in the spring of 1996, and the row of Monterey pines Alf had planted as a windbreak went on the same trailer.

Two Problems, One Cause: Where the Ringtails Went

Here is the question almost nobody asks, and it is the only one that matters: when the old gum goes and the hedge comes out, where does the ringtail go? Keith's answer, after 30 years of people ringing him, comes in two parts. One of them is in your eaves. The other is on the ground at two in the afternoon in January.

Wildlife authorities will tell you, correctly, that ringtails rarely move into the roof cavity itself. That is the brushtail's habit. A ringtail builds a nest of its own, a ball of shredded bark and leaves called a drey, in thick scrub a few metres off the ground. Take the scrub away and it does the next best thing, which is usually somewhere on the outside of your house.

Read that list again and notice what it is really telling you. Not one of those places was put there for her. And every one of them ends the same way: somebody decides enough is enough and picks up the phone.

That is where most people find out about the law. In Victoria it is illegal to trap a ringtail possum at all without a permit . Where catching is allowed, the animal has to be let go on the same property: within 50 metres in Victoria and South Australia, 150 in New South Wales, 25 in Queensland. Possums moved further than that "typically die within days", according to WIRES. A catcher will cost you somewhere between $220 and $700 , and by law he has to let it go within a stone's throw of where he caught it.

"So it stays," Keith says. "Everybody's paying good money to find that out. The only thing you actually get to decide is where in your yard it sleeps."

The worst version of the story is the one he hears most. Somebody seals the gap on a Saturday afternoon with the mother or her joeys still inside. "Then you've got a week of scratching, then it goes quiet, and then the smell. People have changed bedrooms over it. People have sold houses."

The second thing that happens to a ringtail with nowhere to sleep happens in summer, and fewer people see it, because it happens in the middle of the day, when most of us are at work and she is meant to be asleep.

Ringtails deal with heat by letting their own body temperature climb, from about 36 degrees to almost 39, to save water. It works up to an air temperature of around 35 or 36. At 39 degrees, researchers found, a ringtail is at risk of dehydration within about 20 hours . In an old hollow with thick living timber all round it, the inside stays well below the air outside. In a thinned-out hedge, or under an iron roof, there is nothing between her and the afternoon.

In March 2024, four days of heat sat over the Mornington Peninsula. Around 100 dead ringtails were found at Somers beach alone , with hundreds more believed lost across the area. A local friends-of group called it "possum Armageddon". Keith drove down on the second morning.

"They'd come down to the water," he says, and puts the rasp down. "That's what gets me. They weren't stupid. They knew exactly what they needed. There just wasn't any of it left."

"The Rescuers All Say Ringtails Want a Drey"

They do. WIRES and Sydney Wildlife Rescue both steer ringtail owners toward a drey rather than a box. Put it to Keith and he does not argue for a second.

"They're right," he says. "A ringtail builds her own. If you've got a thick hedge you'll honestly never trim, leave it be and don't send me any money. And if you want to wire two hanging baskets together with coir liners, that's a ten-dollar drey and it's a good one. Do it."

He picks the rasp back up.

"But go and ask everybody else. A lawn, a patio, a Colorbond fence and a hedge that gets a haircut every November. Dreys come apart in the spring storms, and you can't see inside one to know whether something bigger's moved in. A box is a drey with a roof on it. And you can lift the roof."

The same goes for building your own. The free plans from WIRES and the councils are sound, and plenty of Men's Sheds turn out good boxes. "Good," says Keith. "If you can hold a saw, build one. A decent homemade box beats a bad bought one every time. It's the bad bought ones I've got a problem with."

The Boxes Wildlife Carers Wish Nobody Would Hang

Which brings us to the stack by the door of every hardware and garden centre in spring: the flat-packs, the painted cottages, the dark green ones that match the fence. The cheapest things in the category, and the ones people who pick possums up off the ground in February worry about most. Keith has spent 30 summers arriving at the same list from the other end, and he can tell you exactly which four things do the damage.

"That's the bit that gets me," Keith says. "Somebody's spent sixty dollars meaning nothing but well. And what they've bought is worse than the fern they already had."

Thirty Summers of Going Back to Look: What Keith Found Out

Keith Hendry did not set out to make anything at all. He worked for the shire for thirty-one years, on the parks crew, and did carpentry in the evenings the way his father had done apples. When the manna gum came down in 1996, the new owners piled Alf's windbreak pines on a trailer for the tip.

"I took them home because I couldn't stand to see them burnt," he says. "Built a box out of the first one. Hung it on the old gum at the back of my own block and didn't think about it again." He stops rasping for a moment. "Fortnight later I lifted the lid and there she was. Mother, two joeys on her back, all three looking at me like I'd walked into their kitchen. And I thought, well. That's not nothing, is it."

He wrote it down: the date, the place, which side of which tree. Then he built one for the woman next door and wrote that down too. That is the whole method, and he has never changed it: build it, hang it, go back and look, write down what you found.

Then came the summer of 2009. Three days above 43 degrees at the end of January, and Black Saturday a week later. Keith found ringtails on the ground in daylight in four gardens in one week. The next summer he bought a handful of cheap min–max thermometers and started putting them inside the boxes. One in a box of his own. One in whatever the neighbours had brought home from the hardware.

The Cool Hollow Principle: Why a Box Is Only as Good as Where It Hangs

An old tree hollow is not a clever design. It is a small space with a great deal of living wood around it, in the shade of its own canopy. University of Melbourne researchers recorded tree hollows at 38 degrees on days when the nest boxes near them hit 52 . A box in the wrong place isn't a hollow. It is the opposite of one.

"She doesn't need warm," Keith says. "She's got a fur coat. She needs a tight little space out of the sun that nothing bigger can get into. Give her that and she'll hold on through the worst of it."

"Thirty-Four Degrees, and Fifty-One Next Door"

Keith takes the ledgers down from the shelf above the bench: not one book but nine school exercise books held together with a perished rubber band. More than three thousand entries, and from 2010 onwards a second column of figures down the right-hand side.

"January 2014," he says, tapping a page. "Four days over forty. Mine read thirty-four at the top of the afternoon. The green one they'd bought next door, west side of a bare trunk: fifty-one. Same street, same afternoon, fifteen metres apart." He shrugs. "Fifty-one degrees isn't a bed."

He turns back further. An entry from 2003, a box delivered to a woman in Balnarring. "Used every summer since. That first box did fourteen summers before I made her a new one, and her daughter's got the house now. She sends me a card at Christmas and writes in it the first night she saw them that year, so I've got the whole run in her handwriting."

Do This First. It Costs Nothing.

Before anybody sends Keith any money, he would like a word about three free things.

"Never the other way round," Keith says. Hang the box close to where they're getting in, and put a bit of apple in it for the first few nights, not longer. Push a sheet of scrunched newspaper into the gap in the afternoon; if it's been pushed out by morning, they're still using it. Seal the gap at night, once they've gone out to feed, and only when you're sure no joey has been left behind. Some people set the box inside the roof space for a few days first, with fruit in it, then carry it out to the tree once the family has moved in. "That's where the lid earns its keep," he says.

What People Write Back After a Summer

The Questions That Come Up Most

A Trade Ends This Spring, and So Does the Supply

After 30 summers at the bench, Keith has come to a decision that nobody imposed on him but that his hands have made unavoidable. It is arthritis, in both hands, and it has been getting worse for five years. He can still cut. He can still plane and stack and sort. But the close work, fitting the hinge so the lid sits true, cutting the doorway clean so there is no splinter at a joey's belly height, setting the grip inside, has gone.

"The cutting's all right," he says. "It's the fiddly work. I can't grip a chisel properly any more, and if I can't do it properly I won't do it at all. Dad would have had something to say about a lid that doesn't shut."

His son Craig works fly-in, fly-out as an electrician in the Pilbara and has no interest in any of it. There is no apprentice. When Keith stops, 30 summers of accumulated knowledge, the ledgers, the temperature columns, the sense of which side of which tree, go quiet with him.

What remains are the last boxes on the packing-shed shelves: 146 of them when we visited in early September . The final ones that will ever come out of that shed.

"The Money Was Never the Reason. It Still Isn't."

Keith could ask more, and anyone who has picked one up would understand why. He has kept the final run deliberately low. Not as a sale. Not as a clearance. As a gesture.

His granddaughter Brooke, 28, runs the online side through Cedar & Tin , a small shop she set up in her spare room in Frankston when the phone orders got past what one landline could handle. "Turns out there are thousands of people who've been looking for exactly this," she says. "Something made by somebody who actually went back and checked."

Keith's Possum Box, in Brief

Where They Are Sold

Keith's Possum Box is sold through Cedar & Tin , the small online shop his granddaughter Brooke runs. It is not at Bunnings and it is not on any marketplace, for the simple reason that one man in a packing shed in Red Hill cannot supply them.

This Spring Only. Then the Heat.

The season has already started. Across Victoria and New South Wales this month's young are coming off their mothers' backs and going out to find a place of their own, with a few weeks left before the first forty-degree day . They will cross garden after garden after garden and find, in most of them, nothing at all. Or a gap under somebody's eaves. And the shelves in Red Hill are emptier every week: the run before this one sold through in nine days.

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