feces. The predator may move on. The possum soon recovers from its sleep-like trance, then continues scavenging and ambling along, sampling all the food it finds while on hunting forays.
It may be their wide, varied diet that has helped it survive. They are omnivorous, meaning they eat plants and animals: crayfish, garbage, left-out cat food, worms, bird eggs, fruit, roots, nuts, garden produce, slugs, frogs, snakes, grasses, mushrooms, salamanders— the list goes on. Such a varied diet— carrion, dead coons, other road-killed possums— has allowed it to adjust to man’ s ever-changing environment. It isn’ t fussy where it lives either, as we know them to take up residency in culverts, brush piles, dumps, junkyards, and other refuse places man creates. So, if it eats everything it comes upon, and lives anywhere it wants, you can bet we’ ll have the possum around for millennia to come.
I once observed a mother possum crawl out from a dead carcass in a field. The bloated and sun-dried body of the cow gave the possum shelter and all the food it needed. I looked inside the exposed belly and saw there were babies, maybe seven, waiting for the mother possum to return. Its fifty teeth— the most of any North American mammal— will certainly help it attack any food item: hard-shelled mussels, skeletons of small mammals, even dried up, sun-baked, cow hide. The possum is not picky.
We know the opossum to be a member of the marsupials, like kangaroos, mammals with specialized belly pouches for developing young. Born as blind, hairless, and tiny they find their way to the nursery inside the mother’ s pouch. The young stay attached to milk teats for weeks while the mother continues on with her life. There is a theory that the possum helps future generations with this natal attention. There is a low mortality rate as the young are taken care of in the pouch where they nurse and get strong.
Lately, we have also heard of the possum’ s tendency for pest control, ridding the garden of injurious slugs, keeping cockroaches at bay, consuming many ticks. All these admirable habits surely deserve respect rather than any disdain.
And those opposable thumbs— no, it’ s not all thumbs, technically toes on their rear feet, called a hallux. These digits help in climbing and handling finely detailed food, to pick at locks and latches, even to open gates and storage boxes. The prehensile tail, which is adapted for grasping and wrapping around tree limbs, is a possum trademark. It can hang from its tail for short periods, but it doesn’ t sleep hanging upside down as some people think. They have been observed carrying clumps of grass and other materials for a burrow or cavity by looping their tail around it.
The awesome possum— another critter living in the Brown County hills, occupying its wide niche, doing its thing to add to our glorious assembly of wildlife— is here for us to watch, admire, and enjoy. One last thing: Why did the chicken cross the road? To prove to the possum it could be done! •
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