Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

Does anyone have a recipe for possum?
May 27, 2009

I may need one soon.  Don’t get me wrong, I am amazed by possums – they are such primitive animals. Possums have gotten personal; interrupting sleep, causing the expenditure of money and giving cause for embarrassment. At 2:00 a.m. the bigger cat plucked the screens on the window – she knows she can wake me up that way – and I did. I stumbled to the door but she wouldn’t come in.  “Meow! Meow!”  Such loud and forceful complaining!  She half ran down the sidewalk and came back, and ran down it again and stopped at the bend, meowing very loudly, over and over.  “Okay, okay.”

I found some shoes and a flashlight and followed her 50 feet.  “Meow,” she said, and the other cat squeaked an answer.  She ran up to the second cat which was crouched in a hunting position.  A few feet in front of her was a half-grown possum.  If they could speak, the cats would have been saying, “What is this Daddy? Huh? Huh?”  We followed that possum for fifteen minutes or more. If we came too close it would turn and bare its teeth (all 50 –  more than any other American animal).

Poor little blind thing. It (or any of the 75 species of Western Hemisphere opossums) can’t focus beyond six or seven feet. It relies on four rows of supersensitive whiskers for most of its navigational capabilities.  Despite being only half-grown at six months of age it was probably sexually mature.  A possum is old at the age of two years.  Possums wander all night. Radio tagged individuals have walked over three miles and thoroughly gleaned a twenty-acre plot of land in one night.  Neither males nor females defend territories and move on when they have exhausted the food in an area.

Possums are marsupials, and the babies are born after only 12 to 14 days gestation.  They immediately crawl into the mother’s pouch and find the nipples which swell until the babies are sealed to their mother.  Although she may give birth to 20 or more young, she has only 13 mammae and some of those have no milk, so many baby possums are doomed to immediate death.  At three months they are weaned and begin riding on the mother’s back.

Possums usually smell bad.  Part of it is by design. Their excretions and secretions are their means of communication – who is at home and is she ready to mate.  Females are in heat only 36 hours every 30 days.  As soon as they mate once the male leaves behind a plug and the female beats up any other male that tries to mate.

A month or two after the cats introduced the possum to me, the possums introduced themselves to the house next door.  Thud, thud, scratch, scratch.  “Oh, dear, we have rats.  They are busy all night and it is hard to sleep.”  For a month they thought rats were making the noise, then one fell down inside of a wall and died, and began to stink.  A workman cut him out of the wall, but I carried that semi-liquid possum off to be buried!  Oh, golly! How gross!  The possum had evidently entered through a vent in the roof, which we plugged, but a week later, scratch, scratch, scratch.  Again a hole was cut in the wall.  This time a less than half-grown possum fell out – quite alive, thank you – and we let it stumble off on its own.

Not much later my truck was not moved for a week.  A possum visited regularly -  on my roof, at my aluminum can box, even hanging on the outside wall.  Then I found its den of sticks, in my truck!  Not in the bed of the pickup, no; not on the spare tire underneath, no; but between the battery and the engine.  A bushel of sticks and grass. And I didn’t find it when I was alone, but in front of someone.  He fell on the ground laughing until he hurt, and he’s told the story to others, I’m sure.

A possum embarrassed me and I’ll get back at them!  Possums have many unique characteristics:  They are immune to rattlesnake venom; if there is plenty of food mostly males are born; they can run a maze better than any animal except man; they are like reptiles and grow until the day they die; their pupils don’t contract and they are almost blind in sunlight.  All these fascinating facts point to their uniqueness.  But all that was negated when the dadgum possum embarrassed me.  So, what’s a good recipe for possum?