Opossums I have Known
Once upon when I was relatively wee, I looked out my bedroom window, which opened out over a section of roof sloping away at a relatively slight angle, and out there in the dark silhouetted by the streetlights there was something moving. Something large and furry. A wild animal! A opossum!
"Mom! Mom! There's a opossum!" I called out as quietly as I could in a projected whisper when she came to the door to say goodnight.
I don't recall whose idea it was, but we quietly placed a bowl of catfood and a cup of water on the flat area intended for some flower pots just outside the window. We closed the window and I lay down to sleep. Just as I was beginning to drift off I heard a munching noise! Excitedly I slowly raised my head up to look out the window and there was the possum munching catfoot happily a mere foot or two away. He had a white triangular face with dark eyes and round black mickey-mouse-ears. His face looked a bit bulgey as he chewed so I creatively named him "Bulgy-Face Opossum." He'd munch for awhile and then drink some water and then go back to munching, before finally sauntering silently off. Thereafter every evening until we finally moved from that house I left him food and water and would often delight in hearing him munching just outside my window.
At our new house I left catfood out sporadically but because there was no convenient place outside my bedroom window I had to satisfy myself with putting it outside the door to the backyard downstairs, and that wasn't as satisfying since I couldn't see who was eating it, for all I know it could have been a gosh darn cat eating that cat food!
Opossums were around though. There was a latticework awning over part of the back patio and in evenings opossums would sometimes walk across it, which they could do very quietly, but with an adorable naivety to the fact that their long naked tail would often hang down and give them away.
For awhile when I was in high school we actually had a pet opossum mom named Emmaline, but I'll let her write about that (mom, not Emnaline). (It's funny actually how her memory of the events differs from mine in some key respects, most notably in her recollection I was there and in mine I was not!!)
Later, after I'd gone to college and/or moved away, a funny thing happened. Beloved cat Pelekea "Pele" Cachaça had gone to cat valhalla after dying valiantly in battle with coyotes, but my parents had left her food bowl full in the kitchen. Then they noticed the bowl continued to get emptier every day! There hadnt' really been a normal cat door so much as they had always left the door open into the garage knownig that one of the ground level vents didn't have a screen on it and the cat used that to ingress and egress the house -- so they concluded a neighborhood cat had been coming in at night and eating the catfood in the bowl, and so they closed the door to the garage before going to bed.
But the catfood continued to disappear from the bowl! Was it the wandering ghost of Pelcat??
They only discovered the answer to the mystery because they happened to also close the door to their bedroom, which they didn't usually do. Mom woke up at night hearing a scratching on the inside of the door, sleepily thinking to himself that the cat wanted out before realizing there no longer WAS a cat! She grabbed the flashlight we Californians always have near the bed in case of earthquakes, and pointed it at the door. Next time there was a scratching she turned on the flashlight -- there was a possum, caught looking flummoxed at the door!
The opossum had hidden itself by the time dad was up too and had turned on the lights. He went to the garage and came up with beekeeping gloves to grab the opossum and evict it. Now the stow away opossum had to be searched for, and it was discovered it had actually been living for some time in the back of the walk in closet in the master bedroom, behind a wall of shoes!!! While we had thought whatever was eating the cat food was coming in to eat it and going out again, in actual fact the opossum had probably been snacking on it as a little breakfast before going out for a night of rambling! After certain pranks detailed in mom's entry, dad evicted the opossum into the back yard.
When I heard this story I felt like that sounded like a perfect living situation that didn't require opossum evicture at all but dad evidently didn't quite share my view.
A random baby opossum I met sometime in 2015
When I moved to Australia I found Australian possums to be somewhat different. As dusk set in these creatures could be seen scuttling along the ground near trees or racing up and down the trunks, or more often heard making unearthly screeches. Occasionally one would run across the roof of my first flimsy accomodation sounding like a miniature freight train. They had stubbier faces, bigger round eyes, non-mickey-mouse ears, and fluffy tails. More people seem to think of Australian possums as cute than American opossums, but I personally feel American opossums are much cuter.
While playing D&D with my friends, because I'm a huge nerd, I would sometimes tell them I was "sneaking silently along the wall like a opossum" and they'd look at eachother and then inform me "Kris, our possums aren't like yours, they're anything but silent."
Interesting o/possum fact -- in America we're usually accustomed to our things being named after things on other continents and not vice versa, but the Australian possums are named after the American opossum. They are "related" inasmuch as they're both marsupials, but Australian possums are more closely related to kangaroos than to their distant American opossum o-cousins.
When I moved into my current little house, the very first night I discovered that Australian possums not only screech, they also, far from quietly creeping across fencelines with only their dangling tail to give them away, seemed to like to jump on my roof and gallop around, possibly holding entire wrestling competitions up there. Nearly every night I hear the thump and clatter of enthusiastic possum sports on my roof, which is not nearly as charming as the sound of old Bulgy-Face eating.
One day I went out into my garage and saw a possum sleeping on a rafter there. I named him Sancho. It was kind of a mystery to me how he was getting in and out since he seemed bigger than any openings I knew about. Now I had a name to complain about when I heard Sancho making a racket at night. "Damn you Sancho!"
Later one morning I found Sancho had knocked over an empty glass jar in the garage and it had shattered on the floor. When I grumblingly informed Cristina of this, her first response was "oh no, is Sancho okay??"
One evening in the summer I was up late just finishing extracting some honey, just slowly draining the extracting machine into some buckets so at the time I wasn't moving much or making any noise, when I heard a scrabbling noise. Looking up I saw Sancho actually climbing up the glass window slats and coming through where one was missing. I hadn't thought he'd be able to get through there. As he came through he saw me and stopped. For a minute we silently locked eyes. Finally I said
"Hi, Sancho."
And he backed back out the window slats and disappeared into the night. I had the window slat replaced because I don't need him breaking things in my garage, though I felt guilty depriving him of a shelter he was accustomed to using and thought about getting a "possum box" put onto one of my trees or something.
Sancho himself, looking like he got brain freeze from eating some ice cream too fast