I’ve been paying attention to dusk a lot this past summer. Noting the gradual darkening of the sky from blue to pink to black; tilting an ear to the crescendo and diminuendo of birds calling to each-other as they settle in to roost. Watching as trees turn from three-dimensional, textural things to stage-prop silhouettes. I’ve been looking for sugar-gliders.

There’s a population of them in a large bushland park in suburban north-east Melbourne; there are doubtless other populations of them around town, too. They emerge from their hollows in the twilight, tiny possums with improbably long and bushy tails and flaps of skin between their forelegs and their hindlegs with which they glide from tree to tree. They move quickly through the air—gravity does most of the work, a glide being mostly a fall put on an angle—and they can be gone before you know it, landing on a tree with barely a sound, grey fur bleeding into grey bark. After dark our eyes can’t detect a lot of colour, mostly shadows.