Opossum               

Introduction

The opossum lives in a wide-variety of habitats including deciduous forests, open woods, and farmland. It tends to prefer wet areas like marshes, swamps, and streams. It is a grayish animal with long, coarse, bushy fur; a long, narrow, whitish, fox-like face; prominent, thin, naked ears; skull set with 50 teeth and a small brain; short legs of about equal length; and a long grasping, scaly, rat-like tail.

Opossums are generally shy, secretive and nocturnal. When pursued, they may climb trees or brush piles to escape. When frightened, they may expose their teeth and drip saliva from the mouth, or hiss and make a clicking sound. One means of defense is the characteristic habit of "playing possum". When attacked the animal rolls on its side, becomes limp and appears lifeless. This reaction is apparently a brief nervous shock and the animal recovers quickly to escape.

Food Habits

The opossum is nocturnal and uses its keen sense of smell to locate food. It is omnivorous and eats just about anything, including lots of different plants and animals like fruits, insects, and other small animals. Sometimes it eats garbage and carrion. Carrion is dead animals. Because so much carrion is road kill, opossums are often killed by cars while looking for food on roadways.

Family Life

An opossum mother may have as many as 25 babies, but she usually will have between seven to eight. The reason opossums have so many babies to insure that some of them survive. Like most marsupials, opossums are very small when they are born – about the size of a navy bean. They climb up the mother's fur and into her pouch where they find a teat. Some babies will not find their way to the pouch and will die. If they make it to the pouch, only babies who find one of the thirteen teats will survive. They will stay in the pouch and suckle for 55-60 days. Then they will move out of the pouch and spend another four to six weeks on their mother's back. In some parts of their range, females will have three litters a year.

Winter Habits

The opossums doesn't hibernate in the winter. It will often hole up during very cold weather because it runs the risk of getting frostbite on its hairless ears, tail, and toes.

Threats

Large numbers of opossum are killed annually along our highways and others are taken for fur. They provide sport to night hunters and baked opossum is a traditional dish in some areas. The fur is of low grade and is used mostly in trims on inexpensive clothing. Dogs, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, great-horned owls and men are the predators of the opossum.

Benefits

They act as scavengers and destroyers of insects and other pests.

Problems and Solutions

Individuals may be a nuisance at garbage cans or bird feeders, may occasionally raid poultry houses, smash eggs and kill small chickens, may disturb or molest game birds or animals or may damage corn crops. You can use a repellent, such as fox or coyote urine.