It’s been a long time since I went on a genuine possum hunt.
As I recall, I was about 13 or maybe 14 when my best friend, David Lewis Godfrey, and I decided to take our Daisy Red Rider BB guns into the woods at night during a full moon.
Although I remember the event with dubious pleasure, stumbling through tangles of underbrush in the darkness, the muck and mire of swamp, the chill of late fall, which offered a preview of early winter.
Possum hunts typically were social affairs: a youngster’s excuse to go into the woods with his hunting buddies, a less strenuous workout than deer hunts and a chance to give your dog a taste of night life.
It offered a time to listen to the quietness, look at the moon and stars, maybe hear an owl or two, dogs barking, the rumble of aircraft, birds chattering in their sleep.
Mostly it’s the sweet silence while the rest of the world sleeps.
Possum hunting is best done when the moon is full, or about full, casting its cool, blue-white light across the fields to keep you from spending quite so much time face down in a bog studying the flora with both legs entangled in briars.
The possum also prefers a nocturnal existence. Hunting him requires little skill or knowledge; some suggest that the less skill and knowledge the better possum you can be.
Ignorance is bliss, but it can be a lot of fun.
Many sportsmen hate possums because they eat quail eggs but think it’s OK for man to eat adult quail.
Last time I tried possum (at an old farmer/mountaineer abode in rural Summers County near Pipestem) I found that after getting past the smell, the grease, and the concept, when roasted with sweet potatoes, the meat is actually quite good.
I prefer duck, after the waterfowl season opens. Closer to Thanksgiving before we again will be privileged to sit in a cold wet blind in rain, sleet and wind and watch waterfowl flying out of range.
But things are looking up.
A century ago, the last great flights of passenger pigeons were coming to an end. Once so thick they darkened the skies, they meant pigeon pie to many a pioneer and farmer.
Today, the bird is extinct, not by hunters’ guns, as many folks think, but by destruction of habitat, the nesting groves, the forests of mast cleared for land development and alterations.
What can happen to wildlife today is best demonstrated by the varied fortunes of wild geese. Some 75 years ago, the greater Canada goose was thought to be extinct, the snow geese disappearing. Conservation interests petitioned Congress and formed support groups to save what was left.
Today our Fish and Wildlife Service is worried, no longer about shortages, but about too many of the birds. The North American snow goose population has reached an alarming size.
As a result, much of the fragile tundra vegetation that the birds feed on is completely gone. It might take decades for this habitat to recover—if it can at all—and there is a strong feeling of urgency to prevent potentially catastrophic consequences to snow geese and other species dependent upon the same habitat.
Federal and state programs are attempting to control some runaway populations of geese by sterilizations, a tool often favored by government to reduce/eliminate populations, even suggested as a solution to wild horse overpopulation at Cape Lookout National Seashore, various Bureau of Land Management lands, buffalo, and elk in Yellowstone.
Hunting possum, meanwhile, requires little skill, but good night vision.
But with the return of all this waterfowl, perhaps there will be less reason to pursue possum.
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Top o’ the morning!