Possum Pat

10/14/2026

That opossum wandering through your yard at night may be doing more than simply passing through.

Virginia opossums are mostly nocturnal and are opportunistic eaters. Their diet includes insects, earthworms, fruit, small animals, and carrion, with the exact mix depending on the season and where they live.

Studies of opossum diets across the United States have found that insects can account for roughly 3% to 13.5% of their food. They have also been documented eating yellow jackets and other insects, making them one of the many wild animals that help shape local food webs.

But their contribution goes beyond eating insects. By feeding on carrion and a variety of other foods, opossums participate in the natural processes that recycle nutrients through the environment.

That doesn’t mean an opossum will eliminate pests from your yard or replace professional pest control. Their diets vary, and their overall effect on household pest populations is limited and difficult to predict.

Still, these often-misunderstood animals have a place in the ecosystem. An opossum passing through your yard at night is usually just looking for its next meal.

Sometimes, sharing space with wildlife means appreciating the small, often overlooked roles animals play in the natural world.

Would you welcome an opossum passing through your yard, knowing it may be helping the local ecosystem?

10/14/2026

10/14/2026

🌙🔦 Your backyard has a secret night shift… and tonight, you can see who's working!

Raccoons, opossums, and cats can all reflect flashlight beams from their eyes, creating an eerie glow in the darkness. The color and brightness can vary with the animal, the angle of the light, and the viewing conditions.

🐾 Sweep your flashlight slowly along the fence line tonight. You might discover that your quiet backyard isn't so empty after all!

Have you ever spotted glowing eyes in your yard after dark? 👀 Tell us what you saw in the comments!

10/14/2026

Bring the dog food in at night and the opossum will still come through, for the better reasons: the grubs and slugs in the beds, the roaches under the deck, the mouse nest under the shed, the fallen persimmons and apples, and the carrion nobody else wants. It's the one night visitor that cleans a yard up rather than digging it up, it doesn't climb into the attic or raid the garbage the way a raccoon does, and it's gone by morning 🌿

The tlacuache of the Mexican original and the possum of the American backyard are the same species, the Virginia opossum, the only marsupial north of Mexico, and the most misunderstood animal on the block. A few things it has going for it. It eats cockroaches, scorpions, rats and mice, slugs and snails, beetles, fallen fruit and roadkill, with 50 teeth, more than any other land mammal on the continent. It eats venomous snakes: opossum blood carries a protein that neutralizes rattlesnake and copperhead venom, and they hunt them. And it almost never carries rabies; its body temperature runs about 94 to 97°F, too cool for the virus to take hold, so the drooling, hissing creature in the headlights is bluffing, not sick.

The hiss is the whole defense. Cornered, it bares all 50 teeth and growls, and if that fails it faints: a genuine, involuntary collapse, mouth open, tongue out, a smell of something dead from its glands, for minutes to hours, which is what "playing possum" is. It can't help it, and it can't be woken, so the right move is to walk away and let it come around.

One correction the American version needs. The claim that each opossum eats 5,000 ticks a season came from a lab study of captive animals; researchers who examined the stomachs of wild ones found almost no ticks at all. It's a fine neighbor for a dozen other reasons; tick control isn't one of them.

Two honest caveats. It will take eggs and the occasional chick, so the coop door closes at dusk. And a cornered one can bite; leave it alone, keep the dog in, and in a few hours it moves on.

This is the month to watch for them. The year's second litter is leaving the pouch and dispersing, so the small one on the fence is a teenager, not an orphan, and the persimmons ripening now are the opossum's favorite food in the world. The biggest danger it faces is the road: if you find one hit, and it's a female, check the pouch, because the young can survive her, and a wildlife rehabber will take them.

Fifty teeth, no rabies, and the roaches are its problem now 🪴

10/14/2026

Yay! My first release here in Reidsville!!