You Just Naturally Got to Be Cool

The other night Randy and Lacy were running around the front yard tracking something when I went to shut the gate. I was hoping it wasn't a skunk. I got my spotlight and found this possum in the fig tree. The figs are starting to ripen and that sweet smell is bringing in lots of animals.


I went to a program as part of my pesticide license training last year and came away with another view on possums. Up to that point, I only knew that they are not very pretty and when they get scared they feign death. On several occasions when we have been out at night, Randy has run and caught a possum and shook it. It lays there "dead." We leave for 5 minutes and come back and he's gone.

Technically they are opossums. Opossums are North America's only marsupial. You'll remember a marsupial is a mammal (has hair and suckles its young) that has a pouch where the young stay during early infancy. The mother possum has a litter size of 16 to 20, but she only has 13 teats, so its first come first served. That 13 is another oddity for mammals; most mammals have even numbers. Their gestation period is only 12 to 14 days. They spend another 70 to 125 days developing before they detach and leave the pouch.

Possums are all instinct. The have very short lives for mammals their size (about the size of a cat). They only live about two years and are relatively solitary. So you can see they are not trained by their parents or a pack. That's where their two forms of defense come in to play. The first I mentioned is to "play possum." The second is to bear their teeth and hiss. I saw this a few years ago also when G-man and his buddies (along with Randy) corned one in the flower bed. It was hissing, growling and bearing its 50 sharp teeth.

Other reasons to like possums. They do not dig in your yard. They are not normally vectors for rabies. They are immune to the venom of pit vipers (cottonmouths, copperheads, and rattlers) The are omnivores: feeding on roaches, crickets, over-ripe fruit and vegetables, and most importantly snakes. 

Every year about this time I see the exoskeletons of hundreds of locusts on trees and various other places. I alway wonder is this the 17th year? I saw this one the same night as the possum molting on the door frame to the shop and happend to get a picture. It had just come out of its shell.

Whenever I hear the sound that the locusts make it makes me think of being in my Grandparent's back yard in MP. They had a big pecan tree in their yard and it was loaded with them.