A real possum appears among plush toy animals in airport gift shop
1 of 2 | On shelves crammed with cuddly toy native animals in an Australian airport gift shop, one fluffy possum stood out: Its big brown eyes were moving.
A real possum caused a brief surprise inside a gift shop at an airport in Tasmania this week when it was discovered sitting quietly among stuffed animal toys.
At Hobart Airport in Australia on Wednesday, a passenger browsing through a display of plush Australian wildlife noticed something unusual. Among the toy kangaroos on a crowded shelf was a brushtail possum — and its eyes were moving.
Liam Bloomfield, a retail manager at the airport, said the passenger alerted a staff member who initially had trouble believing the report.
“The passenger told one of our staff there was a possum in the store,” Bloomfield said Thursday. “At first she thought it couldn’t be true, but then she contacted airport management to let them know there really was a possum inside.”
The animal had positioned itself among stuffed versions of native Australian animals displayed in the departure terminal shop. Above it on the shelf were toy bilbies, the long-eared marsupials often compared to rabbits, along with plush dingoes, Australia’s wild dog. Nearby were stuffed Tasmanian devils, the aggressive carnivores that inspired the animated character Taz from Warner Bros.
One employee recorded the possum on a phone as it sat among the toys. But as more attention gathered around the shelf, the animal became uneasy and eventually moved away from the display.
Airport workers later captured the possum and safely removed it from the terminal without harming it.
Bloomfield said he had no idea what drew the animal to the gift shop or the toy display.
He joked that the possum might have noticed the stuffed animals and decided it could blend in with them.
Exactly how the possum managed to get into the shop — or how long it had been there before being noticed — remains unclear. Officials also believe it was unlikely that someone placed the animal there as a prank, since bringing it into the secure departure area would have required passing it through airport X-ray screening.
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