Field Notes: Possums

~by Jim Eagleman

While on a walk recently I saw an opossum (possum) scamper up a hill. The little critter wasn’t an adult, but a sub-adult, some call a “juvee,” short for juvenile. It made me recall some of the things we shared with the public about the “awesome possum” during our park nature talks. The possum is a true survivor. I had no doubt this little guy did just fine this past winter.

Take a look at the possum the next time you see one poking around your compost pile or woodshed, or lumbering down a county road. Never in a hurry, it ambles along with almost a sideways walk. You might assume since it is slow walking it must be slow thinking, or slow witted. No, its calculating manner has helped it avoid trouble, like dogs, people, predators, and even cars—but not all traffic. “We tend to see more possums hit along roads more than any other Indiana fur-bearer,” my DNR biologist friends tell me when they conduct their annual road-killed counts of raccoons and deer.

Also called pole cat, woods rat, or forest kitty, the possum is a relic of times gone by. We understand that an animal, not too different from today’s version, was living at the time of dinosaurs. Now, that is a testament to survivability! What allows it to last all this time on the planet? What qualities make it nearly invincible?

If confronted, we know the possum’s defense mechanism is to play dead, saliva trickling from the mouth as it assumes a curled-up posture. All you did was maybe touch it with a stick. This feigning death act has helped the possum avoid almost every attempt to attack or kill it. A predator might see it unnecessary to continue a murderous attack if the prey instantly lies motionless, even defecating and rolling in its own 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!