Brainy it’s not.
But the little animal knows enough about feeding and breeding to expand its territory right up to your backdoor.
We’re talking about North America’s only marsupial. The Opossum: otherwise known to some of us as just plain old possum and to scientists as the Virginia opossum (or Didelphis Virginian).
There’s a hilly landscape behind my house in Daniels. A mixture of second-growth oak and hickory forest, scrub thicket, old fields, and hay meadow.
Although some of the topography is steep several hundred yards away, it is well watered with spring rains. Shrub-covered marshes rim the residential area, where woods abut a stream of backyard flower beds.
My little summer garden is only a few feet square, yet large enough to attract a host of these nocturnal prowlers, foraging the leaf litter for snails or caterpillars, a cluster of insect eggs or a couple of juicy slugs.
I always thought possums were slow and simple creatures.
Stupid is the word motorists use to describe the victims of night traffic along county highways.
Even so, my fascination with possums began when some of my wife’s flower blossoms disappeared overnight.
“Could be rabbits,” I consoled her, though I hadn’t seen any of the long-eared, short-legged critters in the open and thriving plants.
Then one evening at about 10 p.m., my wife shouted from the upstairs window. “There’s a possum in my African daisies!”
I hastened to the window, expecting to witness a stubby-legged, long-tailed, greasy-coated varmint carrying off a cache of goodies.
It was too late.
The furry, mostly tree-dwelling marsupial had vanished, startled no doubt from the sudden commotion.
I spent the next few nights in dogged pursuit of the creature that was traipsing through the remnants of my squash and pumpkin vines.
I imagined that my house was surrounded by marsupials at bedtime. I even dreamed about possums coming out of their dens, dozens of them all at once, until the neighborhood was awash in furry mammals.
They would scurry around all night and hole up near dawn—only a few feet off the roadway, sinking into cozy dens of marsh grass and pine needles.
As the weeks waned I realized I was more than a little hooked.
If it’d been mountain lions, tigers, elephants, perhaps I could have better understood my obsession. But possums?
The life of a big cat or even raccoon flows with the seasons at a pace that seems almost leisurely compared with that of a possum, I was soon to discover.
As I was to learn through my research with local DNR wildlife biologists, the lives of most possums are over in a year or two.
But during that short span of time, the animals manage to do what it takes to be a successful species—produce more possums.
Pouched mammals, including kangaroos, wallabies and Koalas are more commonly associated with the outback of Australia than with the West Virginia countryside.
So here we confront what appears to be a stunning contradiction. Possums have proven themselves to be opportunists par excellence.
Still, for a variety of reasons, biologists commonly estimate possums’ intelligence to be low. As one mammal specialist once put it, “This critter is playing with about a third of the deck.”
Other mammals also feign death to deter predators, but this behavior is so closely identified with the possum that “playing possum” has long since become idiomatic.
For their size, though, possums are among the world’s shortest-lived mammals. In the wild, a 2-year-old possum is downright ancient.
Youngsters begin traveling by climbing onto their mother’s back after about 80 days in the pouch.
Some possums starve to death, some freeze or succumb to diseases and parasites, and others are taken by predators such as owls and coyotes.
Motorists (who claim an estimated 35 percent) probably kill more possums than all other predators combined.
The pouched mammals are hunted for food and sport in many rural regions of America, especially in the South. About a million are turned into fur coats and collars each year.
Many of these creatures, however, die of what some biologists refer to as “accelerated decrepitude,” or old age. “They just wear out,” says retired West Virginia wildlife biologist Larry Berry. “By the end of their second winter they look like they’ve had it. Their ears and tails are short and ragged from frostbite, and they are scruffy and thin. Even their teeth are worn down.”
Although it is widely believed that youngsters travel by hanging from their mother’s tail, this has never been documented in the wild by scientists. Nor do they sleep upside down, hanging from tree limbs by their tails.
So, if you find the presence of these gray-coated marsupials in your yard undesirable, the solution is simple.
You can acquire a large dog. Or you can simply stop leaving food outside, and the animals will move away—probably no farther than your neighbor’s house, where the animals can resume their single-minded pursuit of the two things that matter most to them—feeding and breeding.
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Top o’ the morning!