Shooting and fishing: In New Zealand vermin is the new ermine

Published on Wednesday 21 January 2009 09:04

My brother-in-law who lives in Australia regularly incurs the derision of his Ozzie rellies by rescuing possums, a sort of marsupial rat akin to a squirrel which makes its nest and a frightful racket in your roof.

Everyone else in the world treats possums as vermin except Ed who puts them in a sack in the back of the "ute" and turns them loose on the other side of the lake. Which was fine until the lake dried up. So they come scurrying back home.

The only thing you can do with a possum is turn it into a fur boot liner, like Sizzle's mum's friend Kiwi Kate. "Sizzle" is the middle son's girlfriend and Sizzle's mum is a New Zealander who has a friend called Kiwi Kate.

I am not actually certain that Kiwi Kate (www.kiwikate.com) personally spins wellie liners from possum fur. I have a feeling she lives near Cheltenham. But she sent me two pairs of possum fur insoles (washable) because I had complained to Sizzle about cold feet in the snow and Sizzle presumably told her mum who told Kiwi Kate. So it goes.

Now wellie boots as you will know are cold magnets. Which is why the likes of messrs Aigle, Chameau, Musto and Hunter keep turning out a succession of Neoprene-lined wellie boots, each one more expensive than the one before. They may work and look the part, but frankly at 250 a pair in some cases I am prepared to investigate other avenues of keeping my feet warm.

I tend to stick to one pair of wellies at a time unless, as once happened, I come across a free pair in the local skip. Added to which the rubber on all those lined boots with zips and buckles has a habit of perishing far quicker than the price might suggest.

So the prospect of two sets of possum liners at 17 a throw seemed to be a reasonable cash-saving wheeze. Stick with the old wellies but line them, not as I have in the past, with an off-cut of wool carpet (avoid nylon – completely useless), but with pure possum.

By chance the wellies also come from New Zealand and like the doyen of British wellies "The Argyll" are heavy and thick and hard-wearing but not warm. But I can tell you that possum insoles work absolutely in unlined boots, shooting on rock hard Aberdeenshire plough, grass and neeps – four drives standing before lunch and two after and it never lifted above 0 degrees all day. (What I now need is possum mittens.)

Now you might ask, as indeed did I of no-one in particular, why not stuff a bunny down your boots? It is fur, after all. The Chinese are always lining things with rabbit. But the possum advantage, now I have looked it up, is that the hair is hollow which means it traps air, which as we all know is the principal of good insulation. (I might add that deer hair, though rough stuff by comparison to possum is also hollow which means it makes rather coarse dry flies for salmon.)

In case you are worried about the eco-effects of killing possums to keep your feet warm, I can assure you that possums are about the one thing that even the WWF says we ought to be killing. There are 70 million in New Zealand and nothing eats them.

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