Field Notes—

Opossums: Strangers In The Night

By Curtiss Clark

If ever a creature was made for total darkness, the opossum is it.

It’s not much to look at. With its black beady eyes, pale pinched face, pointy snout, snaggle-toothed sneer, death-gray coat, and scaly pink tail, the opossum is the after-hours Ratzo Rizzo of swampy woodlands. It is ugly, slow, and, as it turns out, doesn’t have much of a future.

So it was no surprise that our mutt, Jackson, was pretty full of himself after my wife, Kate, pulled him inside after a tussle with an opossum under the bird feeder just outside the kitchen the other night. Never before had such a heinous foe been slain with such little effort… or so Jackson thought as he begged to be let back outside to gloat over the lifeless form in the snow. But I knew better. This had happened before.

We snapped on the outside light and watched through the kitchen window as the fallen opossum performed his Lazarus act. The creature certainly looked dead, though there was no blood thanks to Jackson’s soft-mouthed battle tactics honed on our household cats. After two minutes of complete stillness, there was a barely perceptible heave in the victim’s chest, followed by deeper, more regular breathing. Its head moved, and ever-so-slowly it righted itself and made for the hemlock hedge in a slow cakewalk.

One of the first things we learn about the opossum as children is that it “plays dead” when threatened. They can be aggressive and nasty fighters when it’s a fair fight, but not when the odds are clearly against them. They certainly aren’t going to outrun predators. The land speed record for an opossum is 4½ miles per hour. So they drop into their peculiar catatonia, which can last from a minute or two up to 20 minutes. It will often, but not always, save them. Many predators lose interest in attacking or eating an animal that is already dead. (I know for a fact that Jackson was more interested in the big braggy show after the battle than in an opossum meal.)

Even though opossums look like they are coming out of a faint when they revive after playing dead, researchers have measured their heartbeats and brainwaves in such states and found them to be the same as when they are awake. Apparently, opossums remain fully aware of their surroundings throughout the whole ordeal, which probably helps them decide when to get up and head for the hedge.

In their interactions with humans, however, the tactic of feigned death sometimes backfires. Playing dead on a busy highway, for example, doesn’t win an opossum any more consideration than real road kill. These days, cars are a bigger threat to opossums than their natural predators, which include coyotes, foxes, and large raptors.

Living to see another day happens less often with opossums than with most other animals. Their lifespan in the wild is just 16 to 18 months. The oldest opossum observed in the wild was three years old; they sometimes manage to live longer in captivity.

A creature that moves so slowly with such a limited future shouldn’t waste time or energy, and opossums certainly get a fast start in life, according to the careful observations of J.J. McManus recorded for The American Society of Mammalogists.

Opossums are born 12-13 days after conception looking more like long-grained rice than a mammal. A typical litter of up to 17 could fit in a thimble. They travel from the womb one or two inches to a fur-lined marsupium, or pouch, where there are 13 nipples. If they are lucky enough to be among the first to find a functioning nipple, they have a pretty easy life for the next two months, suckling continuously in their little pouch paradise until mom introduces them to the reality of their short, harsh life scrounging for insects, carrion, bird feeder cast-offs, and garbage if they can get it. And those are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones die waiting in line for a nipple.

The opossum’s formal name is Didelphis virginiana. Derived from Greek, didelphis means “two wombs.” It was first scientifically studied and described in Virginia. (Its more informal name is possum, which is favored by most people including Kate, who thinks my insistence on opossum makes this American native sound Irish.)

The woeful opossum is not without distinction. Aside from being North America’s only marsupial, it is the only indigenous animal on the continent with a prehensile tail. Opossums can wrap this ugly appendage around branches or other solid anchors in unsteady situations to better secure their shaky hold on the world. When I was a kid, cartoons routinely depicted entire families of opossums hanging by their tails from a single branch — something they can but almost never do.

But that’s the thing about opossums. They are full of surprises. We should never say never about them. They are some of the oddest strangers you will meet in the night. Yes, they are ugly, slow, and without prospects for the future. But they’ve got a bag of tricks to die for.