Daily Pet Photography of @kona -Day116 - Possums! Gotta love 'em
Stalker might have been a more fitting name
for Prince, the curious.
Gotta love possums!
Marsupials, tick-eaters, unjustly hated for being "ugly" - well, I think they're adorable.
They have a LOT of teeth, like crocodile jaws, so, no, I wouldn't make a pet of one. But I do leave watermelon and other scraps for them in the compost heap, and occasionally, when tossing scraps into the compost in the dark of night, a little "hisssss" tells me someone was there, not expecting another delivery.
Then that someone plays dead.
How can you not love a possum?
photo taken on my Samsung phone
LOL!!! Glad to know I'm not the only one who loves opossums.
We have them here locally, in Middle Tennessee, but the only ones I see here are roadkill. Our place and woods have enough hiding places that I've yet to spot them or skunks, though I know both are common here, and in six years I've only spotted a couple of raccoons.
In our last home, in Largo, Florida, we had a couple that set up house in a den they dug under one corner of my greenhouse. I had one close encounter with one of their half-grown offspring, when it managed to trap itself in one of our trash barrels, and after hearing it creating a ruckus trying to escape, I turned it on its side to let the little guy go.
Around the same time, my stepdaughter found a dead opossum in her back yard, that still had its living babies attached to its back. She called me, and I directed her to a local wildlife rescue, who immediately took in the babies. We never did hear back how they fared, but they seemed to be in fairly good shape still, so we're hopeful that they all survived.
Our Newfy mix, Sprinkles, used to go ape when he caught a whiff of them, but then one evening I was sitting on the top of our picnic table, and he was sitting on the bench next to me as I petted him, and when a possum walked along our north fence on its way to our back property line, he just watched it go.
Then again, we had one play dead one night in our front yard, when we had a yard party in full swing, and he just walked up and sniffed it, and left it unmolested.
It was pretty funny as arriving guests kept walking past the "dead" opossum, each of which of course told us all about it, but as the evening wore on, it finally figured out that it was safe to escape, and did so. ;-)
I'm shocked, Cori, shocked, that you too are a fan of the opossum. Ha. I'd have been surprised, by now, if you didn't love them, considering how eerily in alignment we seem to be on so many things!
I've seen them playing dead in my yard and feared they WERE dead, including the little baby possum that looked totally inert, until I carried him off to the woods. Suddenly Lazarus came forth and ran for it.
To find Mama Possum dead, her babies still alive on her back - what a sad image!
Your dog Sprinkles is a better dog than our collies! As a puppy, Prince managed to kill a juvenile raccoon. Not a proud moment for this pet owner.
Thanks for this Cori!
Yeah, I can totally relate.
One of my breeder Silver Fox rabbits escaped her cage, entirely my fault as I hadn't checked the latch despite knowing it was iffy, and I only discovered it when I noticed Lolo going after something next to the front porch, and realized that it was her. I immediately dragged him into the house, but it was too late, and she was already gone.
So much for our livestock guardian, at least when it comes to the little guys.
Ebony and Sprinkles were both accommodating to other animals, and neither seemed to have a high prey drive, which I initially put down to the breed. Newfies are often noted to adopt smaller animals as pets.
Of course, in Sprinkles' case, the friend I adopted him from ran a cat rescue in her home, and Sprinkles was her nursemaid, a la Nana, the Newfoundland in Peter Pan. Any time one of the orphaned kittens needed cleaning, she called in Sprinkles, and he licked them cleaner than most kitty moms could have. Unusually nurturing for a male.
What an awesome capture. The possum looks really mad haha.
I don't like them when they raid my chicken coop!
Oh dear. I don't blame you. No food offerings farther off would entice them to stay away, either, right?
Nope! Once they taste fresh chicken or the eggs, that's it. Game over!