38 Wombat-proof enclosure

To avoid similar problems in the planned new and improved enclosure wombat holes trafficable by other things had to be disallowed. I sought advice from Rural Fire Brigade colleagues.

You can borrow my exterminator said Paul. This was a loaded shot gun mounted vertically over active wombat holes with the trigger attached to a trip wire. You just move it between all the holes around your place and have 100% protection. I have no wombats now he said.

Alan had a different and quite green solution that he had used. The method was to let the wombat make its hole. Wombats aren’t interested in raspberries so you can let them in. You then frame the hole in timber and fit it with a top-mounted but heavy swinging gate. The wombat can come and go freely through this adapted hole while weak things like rabbits and birds can’t move the gate. Good in principle but wombats don’t always go out the hole they enter by. My own solution, the least innovative and least exciting, was to drop the wire-mesh side walls of the enclosure 30 cm into the ground so hampering the wombat digging process. That was the plan I followed.

Digging a slot 30 cm deep around a site 100m x 20m is hard work. I called on Ben. This was to be a father-son bonding exercise like watching Pale Rider together and listening live to touring jazz musicians at local clubs. It didn’t work out that well. I wasn’t sure why until I recalled a similar interaction with my dad. He wasn’t a great gardener, usually restricted in his activities to making borders of bricks around garden beds. These bricks were slanted upwards on their edges for classy effect but also inflicted maximum damage on falling children and tripping old people. Mum was the natural gardener. Dad liked to treat the garden as a route march with compass. You start, you do, you finish, preferably in minimum time. Repeat after a year or two.
His vegie garden hadn’t been dug over for a couple of years. It also hadn’t produced anything in the interval except chickweed, dandelions and grass. The plan was to dig it over to two spades depth thus releasing the deep bound up nutrients and allowing good root penetration. We started but it turned out he had urgent exam papers to mark and lessons to prepare for Monday so could I finish it before going off to rugby. We continued to buy vegies.

Ben and I dug half the length of the slot and because we were trapped in the bush nobody could go anywhere else to do pressing business. It was a good interaction for me. The following week I worked out a much quicker way to dig the remaining slot with less muscle, but by that time I was alone. Ben had learnt nothing except it’s cold at the farm.

The design was brilliant. The 120 cm high fence with 30 cm in the ground was chosen with a mesh that small birds could fly through easily. They were birds like superb blue wrens, bush wrens, diamond firetails, red-browed finch and European Goldfinch and pollinators like eastern spinebill, white-cheeked and white-naped honeyeaters and the chattering New Holland honeyeaters. These were mainly local residents that were joined in summer by yellow-cheeked honeyeaters. It was good to see them foraging at various times. The mesh excluded the larger crop-damaging birds like the sulphur crested cockatoos and crimson rosellas.

Above this strong fence material was hung a 2m wide metal bird mesh which was fragile but very cheap at the time and the roof would be a woven nylon bird net that wasn’t cheap. We had a local timber mill that supplied the 3.5 m treated pine poles that would support the whole structure. Total cost was around $2000 which we could cover in jam sales in a month or two.

I had previously foolishly bought 100m of nylon bird net at a very low price, primarily because I can’t go past a bargain. It was single strand nylon rather than the woven finish. I put some of it up to see if it worked. After three days it had caught and hung three rosellas. They tried to force their bodies through the mesh which stretched but not far enough to free them and in their twisting around they had become hopelessly entangled in other nylon cells. It worked well in the fashion of the shotgun on the wombats. I took it down and put it in a locked cupboard.