About every six months to a year, an opossum will show up in my yard. And it won’t leave.
My house is pretty much surrounded by pavement, parking lots, and churches and commercial establishments with minimal tree cover. My yard, on the other hand, has lots of mature trees and thick ivy in lieu of grass. It’s a little hard to imagine how they find my house in the first place, especially since I’m in the heart of the city, but easy to imagine why they stick around once they’re here.
So in recent years, I’ve been using the trap that used to be used regularly for stray cats and kittens to catch the possums.
They’re usually surprisingly easy to catch. A little cat food, put the trap in the evening out on the back steps, and — clang.
I cover the trap with a towel and release the possums somewhere west of town. I take them to wooded areas, but I’m sure most of them work their way back to human habitation.
My cats ignore the possums, more or less. Multiple times I’ve seen one of my cats simply sit and stare as an opossum ambles past, sometimes less than a foot away. It’s sort of disconcerting.
One can yell at possums, and make loud noises, and throw things, which will sometimes make them run. But they don’t seem to stay scared for more than a minute or so.
And opossums are either remarkably bold or remarkably careless. I have a cat door in the back — and the possums will use it. That means I have to catch them fast.
A few days ago, I had a possum problem that I had never had. Juveniles. Really small juveniles. I suppose they had just been weaned. Years ago, a stray female cat that I later got fixed basically dumped four just-weaned kittens on my back porch, and I’m thinking that the mother possum did the same thing. Get rid of the kids and scram.
I thought there were just two of the young opossums, but I ended up catching five — five! — in just a little over 12 hours. I had trouble getting that first one, however, because they were either too light or too clever to trip the trap. They’d go in, eat the bait, and exit without ever setting it off.
So I had to rig up something — a pill bottle with two slats of wood making a rickety ramp with food at the end. Once the tiny possums got high enough on the ramp, it was bound to fall and trip the trap. Not quite a Rube Goldberg machine, but still.
Rather impressively, I even managed to catch two at once . . .
Here are a couple of pics that I took, one which I posted to Facebook and one to Instagram:
Over the years I’ve come to find opossums to be quite cute and oddly human in their plaintive looks . . . but I still don’t want them around.