So last night I go up to bed (before husband). The bedroom door is shut because elderly cat is not allowed in there anymore. I open the door and in the darkness see…something… moving on the pillows of our bed. In the pre-thought, pre-verbal nanoseconds before I turn on the light my brain goes something like “cat? notCat rodent, squirrel rat” flick on light see very fluffy gray fur, brain returns answer “possum” and defaults to screaming and slamming door.
I move in some unrecorded fashion to the bathroom counter and wait for inspiration or husband. My husband showed up first, probably thinking “oh my god the zombies have finally come!” Also oldest son and youngest son show up, but not middle. Oldest (12) thinks this is hilarious. Youngest(5)cries.
Husband spends the next two hours reading the internet and then patiently waiting for the possum (now under his dresser) to take the cherries and cat food bait he’s placed in his “trap” (kitchen trash can on side). This works! He then takes the possum for a night time drive to an undisclosed location. He is my hero!
How did it get in??? We cannot find an answer. It couldn’t even have come in through the door!
I wish I hadn’t been so stereotypically girly about this. All I could’ve done is wait till morning and called animal control.
Oh, how scary! I once had two raccoons in my bedroom…a very pissed-off mama and her scared baby. They got separated when they scattered when I entered the room, hence all the pissed-offedness. Unfortunately, I was a single mom with no male easily available to help, so I called the city’s animal control, who told me to call a private exterminator. Luckily for me the nearest one was an old friend from high school, who, even though he was just about to leave on vacation, took pity on me and came and caught them…and gave me a cut-rate of $50. In my case, they had gotten in through a screen that had a small tear in it…they climbed up on the roof of our porch, ripped the screen further and crawled in. Don’t know why, there was no food upstairs to attract them.
You were so lucky to have a resourceful husband! I WANTED to be up on the bathroom counter, but the baby was in the tub! Mama was on the top shelf of my closet. Amazing how frightening it is, though. Hope you figure out how the possum got in…otherwise sleeping is going to be problematic!
OOOhh…just remembered…does your closet back up to an attic or anything? A friend kept finding acorns in her shoes in her closet…turns out there was a small hole at the back of the closet where it backed up to their attic. Squirrels were getting in to the attic and then into the closet.
You don’t say where you live, so I can’t tell if you’re an Aussie(?) with a true possum or an American(?) spelling opossum incorrectly. But if you’re an Aussie, be glad that your variety is at least more cute than our variety. (ok, I’ll cop to finding the nastiest possible pic of our variety, but Aussie possums are still cuter)
Late one night after my husband had gone to bed, my three dogs were barking at something in the yard. I went out to investigate, and found they had killed a small 'possum. I thought about what to do - after all, I didn’t want them to eat it! So I decided to throw it over the neighbor’s fence - the one side that didn’t have any pets.
I picked it up by the tail, and it moved!!! :eek: It was “playing possum”! I chunked him over the fence, and went in and washed my hands a bunch of times. :eek:
My husband slept through it all. (I didn’t want to wake him - he works 3 am to 3 pm.)
Thank you for coming up with a far wittier response than I could have!
I know they’re really named “opossums” but that sounds and looks wrong to me. I’ve almost always heard them called “possums” unless the conversation was actually “Everyone calls them possums, but they’re really opossums you know.”
To the extent that I ever discussed possums at all. I think my lifetime possum conversation increased about 10,000% since last night.
I have some Racoons that have have been decimating my cherries and busting all the branches off that I will soon be squeezing through dime-sized holes or at least making dime-sized holes in the the racoons.
I have faced down a large opossum, and can testify to the terror of the encounter. did it snarl at you? Who knew they had teeth like that??
Voltaire has some good pics there, but the teeth on the second on just don’t do it justice. Those look sort of needle-like, like kitten teeth. This sucker had long, thick, pointy robust teeth that looked like they could dig out my aorta or gnaw through my thigh bone with minimal effort.
When my older half-brothers were young they had some ‘unusual’ pets, including a 'possum. Their mother woke up one night to find it sitting on her. She very carefully poked my dad and told him, “Clarence, there’s a muskrat on my chest.” I’m not sure how he got it off of her and out of the room, but he thought it was pretty funny when he told us about it years later. I think she probably would have disagreed.
While awaiting transport to an animal rescuer, a very young, rat sized **O’**possum squeezed through the quarter sized holes on a cat carrier at my house.
Many of the Virginia O’Possums try to downplay their Irish ancestry.
As for how he got in, you must check every possum-billity. (Ours got in through a hole in the floor under the sink to allow the drain pipe to exit the kitchen.)
I had one attempt to get in back when I lived in an apartment.
I got up in the middle of the night to pee and I heard a scratching sound under the bathroom sink. I opened the cabinet door to find a opossum trying to pull itself into the cabinet by way of the hole where the pipe enters the space.
I slammed the door shut and put a heavy item in front of the cabinet door and shut the bathroom door for good measure.
Maintenance came the next day and put plywood over the hole with JUST enough room for the pipe to get through.
