Opossum

an American animal of which an early traveler wrote, 1670, that the female "hath a bag under her belly out of which she will let forth her young ones and take them in again at her pleasure." There are a score of species in the two Americas, varying in size from a chipmunk to a large cat. An occasional specimen of the smallest species arrives in this country from Central America. It comes as a stowaway hidden in a bunch of bananas. The common or Virginia opossum ranges from New York to California and southward. It is about fifteen inches long with an additional allowance of twelve inches for tail. Some naturalists claim that the Pacific coast form is a distinct species. The opossum is a tree-loving animal, climbing about from bough to bough chiefly by the aid of its hand-like feet and a scaly tail. It wraps its tail around a branch and seems to enjoy hanging head downward. Its fur is yellowish, with darker long hair. Its ears are black and leathery. Its teeth are fitted for eating insects, small animals, and berries. Like the raccoon, it feeds chiefly at night. On the ground the opossum moves about sluggishly, like a porcupine, making a track suggestive of a "small deformed human hand." If overtaken, it feigns death or sleep and may be spurned with the foot or beaten with a stick, but it refuses to come to life until its enemies have gone away, when it revives slowly and with many a furtive glance of precaution. This ruse is quite successful, for even a dog refuses to worry a "dead" possum. This is the habit that has given rise to the saying "playing possum."

Burroughs writes entertainingly of a tame possum that acquired sufficient courage to grin at him in "a sort of comical, idiotic way," and had to be sent off to shift for itself on account of a troublesome habit of climbing about his bookcase inspecting books. "One day in March," says he, "one of my neighbors brought to me a handful of young possums, very young, sixteen of them, like newly born mice. The mother had been picked up dead on the railroad, killed, as so often happens to coons, foxes, muskrats, and woodchucks, by the night express. The young were in her pouch, each clinging to its teat, dead. The young are carried and nursed by the mothers in this curious pocket till they are four or five weeks old, or of the size of large mice. After this, she frequently carries them about, clinging to various parts of her body, some with their tails wound around hers."

In autumn, the opossum, like the wood-chuck, takes on a covering of fat for use in winter months when food is scarce. Baked and garnished with sweet potatoes, the opossum is considered excellent eating. Although a tree climber, the opossum feeds chiefly on the ground, and makes its den in a hole beneath the roots of a tree.

See Dunbar; Kangaroo; Gestation