The only reason I can imagine for moving North.
Yeah, OK, but what about before humans set up shop in North America. Did wolves and pumas surplus kill often enough to support possums, coons and other sorts higher on the scavenger hierarchy like buzzards and coyotes.
Were they all supported by mammoth and mastodon carcasses?
Opossums and raccoons are omnivores:
That leaves a lot of food sources other than leftovers from predators.
It is possible to pick up a possum by throwing a towel over it while your roommate pokes it with a broom to get it out from behind the toilet. I recommend that a) you are half in the bag for this and b) you use your roommate’s towel.
My dad had a bumper sticker on our car that said,* “Eat Mo’ Possum”*.
Observations made from possums too stupid to notice that I was sitting 3 feet from them:
They blink their eyes one at a time instead of both at once.
They groom with their paws like a cat–except they use their back paws.
Cats also don’t have the most acute vision, they don’t see 20/20 like we do. But they have far more receptors that detect motion than we do. It’s why they see that brown spider crawling on the brown floor before we do, but if the possum was holding still and the area already had possum scent the cat knew about, it’s highly likely she didn’t see it. At the same time, were the possum to move a little so she did see it, there’s also a high likelihood she would also continue acting like she didn’t see it.
I’ve eaten calf brain, I guess I’d choke down opossum if offered. I’ve heard it’s greasy, like bear, which I ate but didn’t love. I eat frog legs, although a neurophysiologist I know who uses frog gastrocnemius muscle preps told me he throws out 10% because parasite cyst numbers are too high. Yum.
Maybe your cat saw that photo going around Facebook that talks about how good possums are at eating ticks and thought “hey, I don’t like ticks!” and now it has a possum friend?
Darren Garrison wtf are you doing with all these possums, man? And in your living room? Are they pets? (Awwww!)
Thanks for filling me in on possums a bit, y’all. I’m a suburban boy only in his third summer living in the country, so I’m still trying to figure out all these “animals.”
I was actually a little worried that beast was going to shred my little Clementine, and I’d have to get a whole 'nother mouser to keep the vermin population down here at Lendervedder Acres. It’s even kind of nice to think that, just maybe, she’s made a little neighborhood friend named Bitey, and maybe Bitey and she are sweet on each other.
And Darren, I also have to ask why the bloody heck are you getting up close with those possums? Your wondrous tales shame me. I’m afraid I’ll never truly be a country boy.
My sister had a cat who had all the neighborhood cats and even dogs under his figurative thumb. About the size of the OP’s cat or possibly smaller, he wasn’t one you wanted to get on your wrong side. Then the possums moved into our neck o’ the woods.* He tangled with just one before deciding that whole race was best left alone.
*I’d heard they’d gotten here in the Seattle area by following freeway road kill across the Cascades. This was in the early '90s. We were possum-free before then.
When the weather permits, I leave a window or door cracked for my cats to come and go at will–possums discover that, and that there is cat food inside. When they first started appearing, I would catch and relocate them, but eventually they broke me–they are going to wander back out on their own after a few minutes anyway, so I peacefully coexist with them. It was only 3 or 4 days ago that I had a huge one show up in my computer room. He ignored me, except for moving out of reach when I reached down and attempted to pet him. (The end with the tail, not the end with the teeth.)
First close encounter with possums? As a child, driving past a roadkill one and, after noticing young possums gathered around it, making my mother stop so that I could collect them. Took them home, bottle-fed them for a while before passing them along to a couple of great aunts who continued to take care of them until they were old enough to release.
Speaking of “never here before”, I hear that armadillos are starting to expand their range to here (South Carolina.) I’d love to meet one of those (even with the whole leprosy thing.)
My Grandmother lived on a rice farm when she was a kid, and had to cook things people shot. She said o’possum is indeed very greasy. She made a face recalling it.
After all, there are fine literary precedents for such doings: cats and owls… mice and frogs…