Trichosurus vulpecula

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The female and baby were higher in a cherry blossom tree than the male, and all were eating the buds. None of the possums were moving fast through the tree, with the female content to stay on larger branches. At one stage the joey leaned over its mother to her underside where I believed it started to drink some milk because it stayed that way for a while. While the mother and baby were high in the tree I could hear soft guttural, raspy noises; a quieter version of the rolling, growl that possums emit. This noise was reasonably constant and I believed it was the mother making the noise but I couldn’t be certain. After the baby finished drinking the mother started descending the tree. The male coincidentally started ascending along the same branch from the main trunk. The mother let out a very loud possum growl, and the male quickly descended to a different branch. Allowing the female to continue unimpeded down the tree to the where the main branches emerged from the trunk, she then followed a reasonably horizontal branch to the back fence. She did not climb onto the fence but into the mesh of vines and privet that lined the top of the fence. She did not seem to walk along a thick part of the entangled plants but where the vine and privet intermingled to provide a bit of strength. Eventually, the male also started descending. He seemed to be following the same route to the main trunk, occasionally sniffing as he went. However, he looked in a different direction before descending the tree completely to the ground in basically the direction the female had taken, but she remained higher up. He put his face low to the ground, appearing to sniff around him in the leaf litter, before standing up on his haunches. He stayed like that, sniffing the air. Momentarily, he looked back to the other direction, as if alerted by a noise. After a few moments he returned up the tree again to follow a different branch to the one used by the female but he still headed into the mess of vines and privet.