Virginia Opossum

I heard a little commotion on my patio last autumn; an old iced coffee can I had rinsed out and let drain out there was knocked over. My guess was that a squirrel or bird was the culprit, but when I looked outside I saw a Virginia Opossum waddling off my patio. 

I scrambled to dig out my camera and scurried outside to see if I could get a picture, but the little fella wasn't in sight. I was suspicious that an opossum wouldn't be able to get very far with that small head start, so I looked at some of the cedar-like trees outside my apartment. And sure enough, the opossum was up in one of them.

Opossum apparently means "white animal" in Algonquian. (That doesn't sound like a perfect description of them, but perhaps "gray-bodied animal with a white face" doesn't roll off the tongue in Algonquian any better than it does in English.) They've leant their name to other similar-looking marsupials in Australia that are called possums [1]. Slightly confusingly, possum is also a slang term for our Virginia Opossum.

November 2, 2022 at Mt Pleasant Villas
Photo 250356209, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

[1] Despite appearances, Australian possums are more closely related to kangaroos than they are to our Virginia Opossum.

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