Possum TV Live Home Page
What is This?
You are looking at the live server associated with the possum tv site. If you've stumbled on this site from some other place and haven't heard of "possum tv" before, what we're looking at here are webcams monitoring Brushtail/Ringtail Possum nesting boxes in a suburban backyard in Brisbane, Australia. There are currently seven possum box cameras being monitored by this server. From this site you can view these cameras live, as well as download movies which were automatically recorded whenever motion was detected in a possum box.
When to Look
Possums are nocturnal animals. A possum will normally enter their nest box an hour or so before dawn and leave it fairly soon after dusk. These times, however, vary considerably according to the individual possum and the weather conditions—some like to sleep in, especially when it's cold and wet. Sometimes a possum will visit a nestbox briefly during the night, but your best chance of seeing one is during daylight hours. For the benefit of overseas visitors, the local time is shown below.
Brisbane time is: 6:22:21 AM
Dawn: 5:59 AM
Dusk: 5:30 PM
It is now: Morning Twilight—possums will mostly have entered their boxes
Possums are very irregular in their habits. They don't go back to the same box every night, but alternate between sleeping places on a random basis. On some occasions we have had three boxes occupied simultaneously, at other times all boxes have been unused for weeks at a time. Possums are equally likely to use boxes at any time of year, however things are often more interesting in the hotter months; there are more likely to be babies about and possums tend to lie about in cute poses (e.g. on their backs with their legs in the air), rather than curl up into tight uninteresting balls to conserve heat.
Bandwidth Issues
Owing to bandwidth limitations, this site doesn't provide full streaming video, instead, you get an old-fashioned webcam interface with a snapshot of the possum box which updates every couple of seconds. This should work at an acceptable speed, but if things are very slow, it's possible someone else is downloading a movie, so try again in 10 minutes or so.
Also see the Possum TV Blog and YouTube Channel.