“For 38 years I found sugar gliders curled up next to live wires. Not one of them chose to be there.” — Why a 74-year-old Hunter Valley linesman is selling his last handmade glider boxes at a special price, before this spring’s young have nowhere safe to sleep.

The Calls That Wildlife Carers Get Every Spring

Every year, wildlife carers in New South Wales get calls about sugar gliders in strange places. Curled up in the fronds of a banana tree. Inside a letterbox. In the roof above someone’s kitchen.

And sometimes in the most dangerous place of all: inside the electricity box at the top of a power pole, right next to the wires.

The gliders are not lost. They are not silly. They simply have nowhere else to sleep.

Why the Gliders Are Running Out of Homes

A sugar glider cannot dig a hole or build a nest from sticks. It needs a hollow, a gap inside an old gum tree.

Those hollows take a very long time to form. A gum tree has to be old, often seventy years or more, before a branch rots out enough to make a home.

Since European settlement, millions of these old trees have been cleared for farms, roads and new houses. And the hollows that are left are not empty. Indian mynas, starlings and wild honey bees fight hard for every one.

Where the Gliders End Up Instead

So the gliders make do. Every one of these places is a gamble. A banana tree gives no shelter from the cold. A roof brings trouble with the people below. A power box can mean a blackout, or worse.

The Man Who Carried 212 Gliders Down the Poles

Trevor Maddock knows this better than anyone. From 1969 to 2007 he worked as a linesman in the Hunter Valley. In those 38 years he climbed, by his own count, more than 20,000 power poles.

What he remembers most is not the storms. It is what he kept finding at the top.

“You’d open the box to fix a fault and there’d be a pair of eyes looking back at you,” he says. “Sugar gliders. Feathertails. Once a whole family of squirrel gliders, packed in next to the wiring like sardines.”

He started keeping a tally in the back of his work diary. By the day he retired, it read 212. Every one carried down the pole by hand.

The Afternoon on the Gresford Road

It was a hot February afternoon in 1987. Trevor went up a pole to fix a fault and found seven sugar gliders curled in a pile against the cables. A mother and her family, wide awake and very still.

He carried them down one at a time, put them in his hard hat and drove them home on the passenger seat.

That evening he walked the paddock below the pole. The old dead gum at the far fence, the one with the hollow branches, was gone. It had been cleared the summer before for a new fence.

“Seventy, eighty years that tree took to grow a hollow. One afternoon to clear it. And the gliders moved into my power box.”— Trevor Maddock

That week he built his first glider box from offcuts. Mynas took it in the spring. A cockatoo chewed the next one open. It took him 41 tries over 21 years to build a box that worked every time.

Every Part of This Box Is There Because Something Went Wrong

Trevor’s box looks simple. But each detail is the answer to a box that failed.

There is no perch on the front. “A perch is a step ladder for whatever wants to eat what’s inside,” Trevor says.

Up a Tree in One Afternoon

• 1Pick a gumAt least three to four metres up, on the trunk, not a branch that sways.
• 2Face it eastOut of the hot afternoon sun and the cold westerly wind.
• 3Two screwsThrough the back board into the trunk. Screws are included.

The Belt That Still Hangs by the Shed Door

Trevor’s shed sits behind the house on twelve acres of spotted gum outside Paterson. It smells of cedar. Most mornings a kookaburra waits on the fence post for the radio to come on.

Next to the door hangs his old leather belt from the poles. After he retired, he kept wearing it for one more job. Every box he built for a neighbour, he climbed up and hung himself.

“That belt held me up for forty years,” he says. “Now I can’t get my arm high enough to hang it back on the nail.” His wife Lorraine hangs it up for him now.

Why the Last 186 Boxes Are Leaving the Shed

Decades of work above his head have worn out both of Trevor’s shoulders. In March his surgeon told him plainly: no more ladders, no more working overhead.

He can still cut and drill at the bench. What he can’t do is the part that mattered most to him: getting the box up the tree.

“A box on the shed floor doesn’t help a single glider,” he says. “It has to be up a tree by spring.”

He Could Ask More. He Won’t.

Trevor never made a living from his boxes. For years he gave most of them away and hung them for free.

The price he has set now covers the cedar, the steel plates and the postage. Not his time.

“People tell me to charge more,” he says. “But every box still sitting here in October is a glider family sleeping in a power box or a banana tree somewhere. I’d rather they went up.”

What he wants is simple. That this spring, in as many backyards as possible, there is one more safe hollow in a gum tree.

“If you hang one of mine and see a little face at the door at dusk, that’s my payment.”

What Glider Lovers Say About Trevor’s Boxes

• ★★★★★

  “We had a cheap possum box up for two years and only ever saw mynas in it. Trevor’s box went up in August. By October we watched three sugar gliders glide out of it at dusk.”

  – Helen R., Maitland NSW
• ★★★★★

  “Solid cedar, a proper steel plate on the door and it smells like real timber. My son put it up for me with two screws in ten minutes.”

  – Graham P., Toowoomba QLD
• ★★★★★

  “I read about the seven gliders in his hard hat and ordered two on the spot. One for our ironbark, one for my sister down the road.”

  – Lorna T., Bendigo VIC

Questions Readers Keep Asking

Where can I buy Trevor’s glider boxes?

Only through this page. Jaxon, the young electrician from across the road, set up the small online shop for him. You won’t find them on Amazon, Temu or in any store.

How long will they be available?

Only while the last 186 last. Trevor’s surgeon has ruled out any more work overhead, and he won’t build another run.

What if no glider moves in?

You have 30 days to return it, no questions asked. One short email is all it takes.

• ★★★★★

  “We hear the gliders yapping in the gums every night but never knew where they slept. Now I know. Two of them use Trevor’s box behind our shed.”

  – Barry and Jan K., Dungog NSW
• ★★★★★

  “I’m 71 and don’t do ladders anymore either. My grandson hung it on the old spotted gum. It’s the first thing I check every evening with my cup of tea.”

  – Margaret D., Port Macquarie NSW
• ★★★★★

  “The cockatoos here destroy everything made of wood. Six months on, the steel plate hasn’t a single mark and the door is still the right size.”

  – Peter L., Ballarat VIC