northeast-flora-and-fauna

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 con...