Possum Tales
Mention possums and people shudder as though the very word is enough to send them running. How hideous: Those rat-like tails! Those beady eyes! That comical grin!
It doesn’t help that people usually only catch a glimpse of them in their headlights, grinning from the side of the road, scavenging for food.
They tend to be shy, nervous creatures. They become so frightened they “faint,” what’s called “playing possum.” They can remain comatose anywhere from 40 minutes to four hours.
They’re amazing, really: with their 50 teeth – more than any other mammal – and those pouches in which the females carry as many as 13 babies. The pouch looks more like an elastic circle on their bellies, almost imperceptible when it contains no young.
They are scavengers, eating our leftovers. That’s often how they get injured, searching through the trash thrown careless from a car window, drawing them into danger. Cats and dogs also take their toll, especially on the young ones.
In captivity, their habits sometimes resemble those of cats: they hiss, they sleep all day. When they wash, they rub their paws over their faces much in the same way as a satisfied, well-fed cat.
But that’s not to suggest they should ever be kept as pets. Because they AREN’T cats. They don’t react to humans in the same way as cats and dogs, which have become domesticated over thousands of years. Possums remain skittish, suspicious, their eyes darting around the room, not looking at you, not wanting to be coddled, to be tamed.
The Opossum Society of the United States is a great resource for information about possums. The society's web address is: http://www.opossumsocietyus.org/opossum.html
At the rehab center, we start seeing the babies in February and March, some so young they’re blind and naked. If they’re going to survive, they have to be kept warm.
I remember walking into the rehab center one day, and seeing another volunteer, Richard, his tall frame hunched over on a small stool, cupping something in his hands. It was a possum a few weeks old that he was warming in his hands, as though trying to instill in it the will to live.
Sometimes when I get angry at humans for driving Hummers, for throwing their trash onto the highway, for their callousness toward the other animals on this planet, I think of Richard sitting there trying to keep that possum alive. And I think maybe there’s hope afterall.