Opossums Have Super Powers!

I am the Opulent Opossum, and I approve of this message!

On Oct. 13, the Center for Biological Diversity posted a wonderful video on their Facebook page!

Click here to view it.

Consider these amazing facts about our North American opossums, Didelphis virginiana (I’ve copied these directly from the Center for Biological Diversity Facebook page):

Did you know opossums have superpowers?

Here are a few examples:

1. An individual possum can eat 4,000 ticks in a single week, cutting down on infectious diseases like Lyme disease.
2. They have a near-immunity to rabies.
3. They have a total immunity to rattlesnakes, cotton mouths and other pit vipers.
4. Their kind has been around since the time of Tyrannosaurus Rex and they likely ate dinosaur eggs.

Get more wild and weird facts about the critters all around us by joining our online network: http://ow.ly/loqL3057fCY
#opossums #possums #marsupials #fightextinction #biodiversity

And here is the video they used as a basis for their public service announcement--enjoy!

Our Musical Opossum

Every once in a while, I’ll awaken in the night to hear Grandma’s windchimes* dinging and donging far in excess of what any current breezes might naturally cause.

I came to the conclusion that it must be a “critter” out there on the handrail at the top of our back porch steps. We have had raccoons, opossums, and half-feral cats perch, at times, on that wooden railing. The long, metal tubes of the windchimes stretch down from the soffit nearly all the way to the railing.



Maybe critters view the windchimes as a possible way to access the roof of our house. Like an incredibly noisy, hard-to-grasp rope ladder. Maybe that’s the attraction.



Anyway, we finally caught ol’ “Tuffy”** in the act a few nights ago. Sorry, there are no pictures—I’ll have to paint it for you with words.

It was well after dark. We were sitting on the sofa on the sunporch, reading Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley to each other—and that clanging started up. It was not particularly windy, but the chimes were dinging and donging so vigorously that it might have been someone swishing his hand among the pipes: Ding-dong-dinga-donga-ding-dong-ding-ding-donga-dong!!

“Sue! Shh! Let’s see what’s out there!”

We snuck up quietly to the door between sun and screen porches—unlocked it carefully—swung it open—and caught “Tuffy” red-handed!



No joke: He (or she) was on his back haunches, with his arms upraised, “playing” the windchimes with his little pink opossum hands as if he were stroking the strings of a harp.

Dinga-dong-dinga-donga-ding-dong-ding-donga-ding!!

He quickly sensed we were watching him and immediately withdrew to a crouching pose, still perched on the railing. He turned his head to face us, nose-down, unblinking, in that way they do—like they’re looking over their eyeglasses. You know—that opossum deadpan expression that always seems to sigh: “Seriously? Surely you are not going to make me have to run away—are you? Come on . . . seriously??”

We retreated quietly back into the sunporch, closed the door between us, and “Tuffy” likewise retreated silently down the back porch steps.

A half hour later, it occurred to me that we had an extra apple we’d acquired during our recent trip to northern Ohio. A mini-Cortland, ooh-la-la. I placed it at the top step, in case “Tuffy” returned.

Musicians should be paid for their efforts, I believe.

No, we don’t make a habit of putting food out right by our back door for the opossums. But just this once, I did.

About 4:30 the next morning, I again awoke to “dinga-donga-ding-dong-dinga-donga!” By the time I arose, the apple was gone.

And that’s the story—so far—of “our musical opossum.”



* Realize that I’m compelled to call them “Grandma’s windchimes,” because from my perspective they were “always” here at Grandma’s house, and seemed an extension of her personality. One could always hear them dingle-donging just outside the bathroom window, or while sitting out on the sunporch. When we bought the house, we saw no reason to take them down or move them. Like so much else at our house that we technically own, I feel like I’m just a “caretaker.”

** We call every opossum “Tuffy.” We just do.

Opossum Playing Opossum

How exciting! My friend Jenice over in Moniteau County sent me this picture of a possum playing possum!

It happened on Monday—she told me the little marsupial had been snuffling up the uneaten seeds under her birdfeeder, when a friend had arrived with her dachshund, and the dog had, well, accosted poor little Tuffy under the birdfeeder.

With the following result.



Aww! It sure looks dead, doesn’t it. Think of it: A wee little wiener dog freaked out this scruffy wild animal! I suppose it is especially rude to be interrupted while dining, however . . .

You know, apparently when opossums “play dead,” they actually do kind of faint; it’s almost like a coma—they get so emotionally worked up, they lose consciousness. It’s not voluntary; they don’t control it. It’s one of their many defense mechanisms.

I’ve actually never seen this behavior in person. You know, even though I’ve claimed the “Opulent Opossum” as the name of my blog, I don’t have a long history of handling them, or even thinking they’re special . . . although as I wrote in one of my first posts, they really are nifty creatures, and worth naming a blog after.



And guess what! This is also my annual “Happy Birthday” post for my blog! I started the Op Op on March 3, 2009, so I’m embarking on my seventh year of this! (Boy, how time flies!)

Special thanks, and a big ol’ “Op, Op, Hurray!” to Jenice Taggart for sharing her photo with me! One of my favorite things about having this blog is that it’s connected me to so many great people, and she’s one of the best!

Op Op Celebrates!

As of early March, the Op Op blog started on its fourth year! To date, I’ve done 484 posts—egads!

Springtime is a great time to have started something, isn’t it?

We had a wonderful sign of celebration (AND a kickoff to the start of a wonderful birthday for my sweetie, Sue) this morning! With this warm weather, we’ve had the windows open all night long, so we awakened this morning to singing birds, as well as this sight:




Yeah, it’s “Tuffy the Opossum”—it was crawling around in our redbud tree at dawn. (I was wondering what Genji, our cat, was watching so intently!) (Sorry about the picture quality, but it was dawn, and you know how autofocus works!)

This past week, an opossum had been run over on Broadway; we buried her out beneath the elderberries. There was one teeny-tiny (dead) baby in her pouch. It was rather sad, but it’s reassuring to see that some of the opossums of our “urban wildlife” are still around.




For those of you who weren’t on board at the beginning, I encourage you to take a gander at my early posts. Ho-ho-ho!

There was the Op Op “signature” martini, for instance!

And four posts in a row discussing “what is an Opulent Opossum”! Surely by now, it’s clear this is not really a blog about marsupials. Those posts explain what I’m getting at with the phrase.

Grandpa’s dandelion wine recipe, Grandma’s recipe for wilted lettuce salad, and a post about the deep “roots” of our peonies helped set the tone for the blog (I think).

Did you know that when I started this blog, I really hadn’t taken many pictures at all? It’s been fun learning, and sharing with you. I’ve created albums on my Op Op Facebook page of some of my favorite photographs.

Well, here’s to Op Op year four. Thank you, so much, for joining me.

—Julie

Opossum Massage Video

Hey, a couple of friends have shared this video via Facebook, and it's so hysterical, I had to share it here, too. Enjoy!

(Make sure you notice the opossum's expressions throughout.)

Katy Trail at Portland: More Opossum Tracks

Yesterday there was still snow on the ground, but it was melting and the ground was getting soggy, so instead of slopping through a muddy trail somewhere, we opted for the relatively tidy Katy Trail.

We walked on a part we hadn't been on before: Portland, Missouri, and a few miles east from there. A nice section of trail! Some parts of the Katy go through crop fields; others through woods. Here, as with other popular parts of the trail, rocky bluffs rise on one side, and the Missouri River and various jungly bottomlands spread out on the other. I suspect this section of trail isn't traveled as much as areas near large population centers.

Also, I love driving the section of Highway 94 near Portland--it curves through forested hills that open up occasionally to offer more expansive views. It's not an interstate--you know what I mean? Hooray!




Anyway, there is lots of evidence of wildlife activity in the area, notably beavers near Big Tavern Creek where it joins the river.

But what I especially wanted to share with you are a few more possum tracks in the snow. These tracks were right on the hiking/biking trail.




There were tons of various tracks all over the trail, by the way, but ours were the only human ones. It is so illuminating how the snow makes visible the hundreds of comings and goings of critters that otherwise leave little trace.

In these pictures, you can see the marks the opossum's tail made as it walked.




Hmmm. I'll bet their skinny pink tails get really cold in the winter.

I Told You They Have Opposable Big Toes!

We slept late. It’s been a hard week. This morning Sue looked out the back window at the snow in the yard and saw tracks. They seemed roughly triangular. Had a goose walked around in our yard this morning? Unheard of!

Realize: We were looking at them from the second floor.

Upon closer inspection, and double-checking on page 26 of the impressive cornucopia of mammal information that is The Wild Mammals of Missouri, 2d rev. ed., by Charles and Elizabeth Schwartz (whose text and illustrations are often lifted by many other authors and Internet sites), we realized it had been an opossum that wandered around our yard last night.

The Schwartzes write that female opossums are more likely to hunker down in frigid weather, so the chances are better that it was a male who visited.




The tracks are in pairs—left hand and left foot together, practically touching, then the right hand and right foot together, etc.






The hind feet leave quite unusual-looking prints on account of the big toe, which spreads out widely so that the left big toe is at about 4 or 5 o’clock, and the right one is positioned at about 7 or 8 o’clock—very distorted compared to how you might think they “should” be.

What a nice little gift from the critters last night. That Mr. Opossum snuffled around our yard last night makes me smile.




(For more about opossums and this blog, click here.)

My Birthday Possum

Saturday was my birthday, and my mom hit a home run with her gift to me. Since I was a little kid, she was always good at picking out stuffed animals for me. Ones with character and personality. Ones that were cool and could become real friends to an imaginative kid such as myself.




So Mom gave me a stuffed animal on my birthday—in honor of this blog, it’s a little opossum. She saw it at the gift shop at Cracker Barrel, which, as of September 11, is the exclusive seller of the brand-new Ganz Webkinz Opossum.

The pink nose, hands, and tail are super plush, and the body fur is a respectable representation of an opossum’s frosty gray coat. The tail is curled and you can hang the possum by it. It’s a fairly realistic stuffed animal.




Like others in the Webkinz line, the opossum “comes to life” online at the company’s kid-safe Web site, where children can log on and play with their critter in a virtual world.

You can buy them from Cracker Barrel online; they’re $13.99.




Honestly, it’s been a long time since I’ve eaten at a Cracker Barrel. I quit eating there in the early 1990s when the company blatantly implemented patently discriminatory policies toward its lesbian and gay employees. The company reversed the decision in 2002 and added “sexual orientation” to its nondiscrimination policy, but I guess at this point, for me, it’s become a habit not to go there.

I really do like their “country vegetable plate,” where you can make a meal out of your choice of four of their side items. I’m partial to the turnip greens (I think Cracker Barrel is the only national restaurant chain to regularly offer cooked greens); the fried okra is also something you can’t get at other chains. There’s also pinto beans, fried apples, “dumplins,” mac and cheese, and more. I mean, for a chain restaurant, Cracker Barrel isn’t too bad; it’s one of the few chains where you can get down-home country food, southern-style cooking.

Though I always, always urge you to try out the locally owned and operated places.

And I wonder if they planned it this way, but at the same time that they’re offering this Webkinz opossum, they’re also the exclusive seller of George Jones’s new CD, A Collection of My Best Recollection, a “best of” compilation that includes two previously unreleased songs. And George Jones, you know, is known as “the possum.” . . . Coincidence?

(. . . Possums! People are going to think they’re my favorite animal or something. But our kitties know better.)

I Am a Bunny. I Am Not an Opossum.

I recently bought myself a children’s book just so I could get the cute stuffed animal that came packaged with it. Yes . . . it was a total “impulse buy.” But reading the book made me reflect a bit on how we teach kids about nature . . . and about themselves.



The book is Opossum at Sycamore Road, by Sally M. Walker and illustrated by Joel Snyder. It’s part of the Smithsonian’s Backyard series, whose goal is to “have an educational message that answers many questions about the habits and habitat of the animals in our own backyards.” The “interactive storybooks, audiocassettes, and stuffed animal toys” that constitute the “collection” are “developed under the direction of curators for the National Museum of Natural History (a Smithsonian Institution Museum).”

Already, I can smell a huge administrative committee at work on this project.

The basic gist of the book is “a day in the life of an opossum.” Well, actually, it’s a night, because the subject of the story is nocturnal. The story begins under a moonlit sky as an opossum drinks from a suburban puddle.

Throughout, this opossum is called “Opossum”—no articles; Opossum is her “name.” So on nearly every page, it’s “Opossum does this”; “Opossum does that”; and “After a while, Opossum does something else.”

Our opossum is a female carrying around her four babies—oops, make that “baby opossums”—in her pouch and on her back, while they all engage in foraging behaviors.

The illustrations are quite realistic; if the animals look cute, it’s because opossums have pink digits and olfactory organs, and their external, hairless ears swivel to face the objects that hold their attention. But there’s no question: These are real, wild animals.



The point I’m making here is that there’s absolutely no anthropomorphism in the whole book; I gather that the entire administrative committee used a fine-tooth comb (one constructed for only veterinary purposes, at that) to remove any semblance of wording that might cause a reader to “identify” with the creatures described. Very “scientific.”

This is not to say that one doesn’t still instinctively root for the opossum when a “large, brown dog” whips around the corner of the beige house and surprises the single-mother opossum family while they are plundering an unsecured garbage can.



(Blooper alert: On page 15, the text reads “Opossum . . . heads toward the garbage cans lined up alongside the house”; and on page 18, it’s again “garbage cans”—but all the pictures show just a single garbage can, alone, by the side of the house. I guess the “oversight” committee overlooked this detail.)

Anyway, the babies escape the terror, and when she is unable to evade the dog and he grabs her in his mouth, the adult opossum instinctively becomes limp and doesn’t move. She looks gross, like she’s dead. The dog then leaves her alone. It’s all carefully objective, like you’re seeing it through a telescope. It’s exciting, but it’s not like a “friend” is in danger of being killed.



But the story is pleasing, anyway, and like so many good kids’ books, it gives a sense of a cycle—beginning as the opossum awakens under the starry sky and ending with the opossum family curling up to sleep safely in their leafy nest in an oak tree as daylight dawns. . . . This would make an awesome bedtime story.





But I also want to dial back to another nature book for kids, one for a slightly younger audience, which came out in 1963: Richard Scarry’s I Am a Bunny. I suspect this might have been the first book that was my very own—my Grandma S gave it to me in 1967 on my second birthday. (See? It’s no surprise that I wanted to have a career making natural history books!)



This book also follows a cycle—a cycle of the seasons, beginning in spring and ending in winter. It, too, ends with “bedtime,” as our cheerful little protagonist-bunny “curl[s] up in [his] hollow tree and dream[s] about spring.”

. . . Bunnies dream? Are you sure?

This book features anthropomorphism gone hog wild. (Hey, what do you call an expression like “hog wild,” where animal attributes are applied to describe human behavior? That’s zoomorphism, isn’t it? And shouldn’t that be “outlawed,” too? What is good for the goose, is . . . oops, there we go again.)

But in this book, there is no question: This is not an actual rabbit.



I Am a Bunny takes other liberties with reality, too—bunnies don’t live in hollow trees (that I know of), and the cover picture shows Mr. Bunny using a pretty red fly agaric mushroom as an umbrella during a rain shower. The problem of scale is only the tip of the iceberg, here. The editorial committees of today surely wouldn’t allow such flights of fancy—but good lord, that’s a poisonous kind of mushroom, even, and the bunny is smiling! We don’t want to give kids the wrong idea! Think of the potential for lawsuits!

Anyway. I am favorably biased toward I Am a Bunny because of its unapologetic anthropomorphism. The bunny wears a pair of red overalls and a yellow shirt—cute like all kids’ clothes—and he rejoices in something in every single season.

“In the spring, I like to pick flowers.” “In the summer, I like to lie in the sun and watch the birds.” “In the fall, I like to watch the leaves falling from the trees.” Each page is like a mantra or affirmation; as you read it, in all this glorious first-person, you become the human-bunny yourself, and his words echo in your head and become your own.



The bunny—he tells us his name is Nicholas on the first page, even though he doesn’t really need a name, except that it is polite to introduce oneself and he is a model of good behavior—is basically just a little kid dressed up in a bunny costume. He sits quietly by the side of a pond and watches frogs. He blows a million dandelion seeds into the air. He stands quietly, smiling, watching “the animals getting ready for winter.”

Yet throughout, nearly all the rest of the animals and plants in this book are illustrated with objective accuracy. The spreads showing autumn leaves, butterflies, and insects are so carefully rendered it is possible to identify to species. (I suspect Scarry used the Golden Nature Guides for reference—same publishing company; how convenient for him.)



So what’s going on here? In a strange blurring of boundaries between child and critter, this bunny-kid is a vehicle for getting inside of nature. Nicholas the bunny-child not only shows the human reader how to imaginatively get inside another being, but also demonstrates the pleasures of appropriate nature viewing. Sit and observe mammals and amphibians quietly. Dance in the falling leaves. Chase the butterflies and let them chase you. Put on a stocking cap and embrace the snowfall. Lie down in the grass to see the insects more closely.



The bunny with human faculties simultaneously exercises our human wont to imagine ourselves in other beings while modeling our ability to see the “other” in nature objectively and, at the same time, rejoicing in our ability to discover and appreciate the outer world. There is symbolism, science, and emotional wisdom taking place in I Am a Bunny, while Opossum at Sycamore Road simply pins down that outer world with dispassionate objectivity, offering information without a soul.

Hmmph. I’m glad my Grandma gave me I Am a Bunny when I was little.


Books Discussed in This Post

I Am a Bunny, by Ole Risom, illustrated by Richard Scarry. A Golden Sturdy Happy Book. New York: Golden Press, 1963.

Opossum at Sycamore Road, by Sally M. Walker, illustrated by Joel Snyder. Smithsonian’s Backyard series. Norwalk, Conn.: Soundprints, a division of Trudy Corporation [blah-blah-blah], and the Smithsonian Institution [in some kind of multiorganizational administrative cooperative agreement that is not entirely clear from the copyright page], 1997.


(Thank you also to Norman, my dear I Am a Bunny–reading model. He is not a bunny or an opossum. He is a dog.)

What's Op Op, Part 3

(More on the title of this blog.)

Opulent Opossum: It’s an attitude. Do you know much about opossums? Most people know them from seeing their poor broken bodies along the highways. Or, you’ll see them sniffing around your garbage cans at night.

Opossums are nocturnal omnivores. Often the size of grossly obese housecats, they have thinnish-looking gray fur, a white face with a long, pointy schnozzle, big beady brown eyes, and a slippery pink nose. Their legs seem too short. Their pink hands are nimble and delicate looking.

Surprised in a beam of light, opossums will just stare at you, like you’re invading their privacy (and well, you are). Harass them enough, and they roll on their backs and give a death hiss as if expiring their final breath. Yet as they waddle away in their getaway “flight,” you get the idea that deep down, though they’re cussing at you, they’re ultimately unflappable.

They’re amazing creatures. They’re common here in mid-Missouri, and they’re found all over the eastern United States and down into Mexico; also along the West Coast. They’re the only marsupial mammal in all of North America. (Compare that to about 120 different species of marsupials in Australia—think of it: The opossum’s relatives include critters like kangaroos, koalas, Tasmanian devils, bandicoots, and wombats.)

We all know about the special features of marsupials from watching the Discovery Channel, and possibly also from paying attention in biology class. Unlike placental mammals (such as us and mice and whales), marsupials don’t carry their young for long inside their uteruses; instead, they give birth to shockingly underdeveloped young that continue their development attached to teats within their mother’s pouch.

During a heat period, a female opossum (biologists call our species the Virginia opossum, Didelphis virginiana) commonly releases 22 eggs from her ovaries. Many of the young that develop and are born aren’t successful in the long, blind journey swimming through the mother’s fur from birth canal to pouch to nipple. There are only about a dozen teats in there, anyway.

Isn’t this fascinating? If you lived someplace that didn’t have any opossums, or any marsupials at all (such as all of Africa, all of Eurasia, and all of northern North America), wouldn’t our basic ol’ gray opossum seem like a nifty creature?

And cuddly looking. Once they get their fur, opossums are extremely cute. Really, it’s only when they’re hissing or trapped in the corner of your stupid junked-up shed that they look unwholesome. My Peterson’s Guide to mammals comments on their coats: “Fur salable, but of little value.” To which an opossum might reply, “So leave me alone, then, Jack!”

They’re expert climbers. Hey, don’t be too proud of your opposable thumbs, because our opossums have them too, as well as opposable big toes—the better to climb trees with. The prehensile tail also helps.

There are a lot more interesting facts I could tell you about opossums, but I’ll leave you with this: Even though they’re associated with the greasy dinner tables of hillbillies and other impoverished Southern types, of Elly May Clampett and her twangy grammar, even though opossums are not above clawing open your trash bag out on the curb and do kinda resemble enormous rats—

They’re pretty damn cool.

(Information in this post was gleaned from The Wild Mammals of Missouri, second revised edition, by Charles W. Schwartz and Elizabeth R. Schwartz, 2001. It is packed with cool information and illustrated with Charles’s incredible drawings.)