Early this evening I saw an opossum walking through our back deck. I informed Pere and Z and quickly went outside to follow it. I saw it disappear under an old cupboard we have out there. It is a pretty nasty cupboard - it some art supplies, some picnic stuff, a butterfly net and bug catcher and recently I put stored some moss that I got at Petco in there. It is "nasty" because we hardly go in it and thus it has lots of spider webs on it and dead leaves around it.
Pere thought maybe it got into the cupboard so I slowed opened the bottom drawer and I saw it's hairy back and bare tail crawling into Z's beach pail! It looks like he made himself a nest in there with the moss and the plastic bag the moss was in.
I wanted Z to be able to see the opossum better so I found a box and picked up the pail and put it into the box. I got these picures while it was in the pail in the box.
We went back in, the opossum looked like it wanted to sleep, and I read Z the story about Why the Opossum's Tail is Bare. Cute story. We also did some more factual research
Did you know that:
The adults have 50 teeth.
They use their prehensile tail as a fifth hand to help them move around with and they have a thumb (without a nail) on their feet.
They are nocturnal.
Apparently Opossums are nomads so hopefully this guy will move away in a couple days. I can't image what a heart attack I would have had if I had opened up the cupboard unwittingly and found it starting back it me!
2 comments:
I can vividly remember the evening that I was surprised by an opossum sitting up on the fence looking down on me. EEK!
Was it a big one?
I have this whole long story about pulling my dogs (I used to have a Grendel and a Barnabas) off a opossum and thinking it was dead and freaking out and trying to nurse it back to life without touching it much for HOURS - only to find out that it was "playing possum" the whole time!
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