Opossums are popping up all over my backyard
Toronto is a magnet for immigration, even for American critters with 50 teeth and a long, rat-like tail.
An opossum sighting in my yard is an almost nightly event lately, and I suspect I’m far from the only one around here who is spotting the U.S. invaders in ever-growing numbers.
This is the Year of the Opossum around my house along the Scarborough Bluffs, after I put up a bird feeder given to me last Christmas and started sprinkling birdseed on the lawn for winged ground feeders.
The food is also eaten by squirrels and raccoons, which is OK with me, but I did not expect the parade of opossums that descend on our yard soon after nightfall. They’re such regular visitors that I got over being surprised by them months ago, but not my neighbour.
I was watching one nosh on birdseed about 9:30 p.m. a couple weeks ago, when it started out onto the sidewalk. I saw the silhouette of my neighbour on his porch across the street, so I called out to him to take a look. “I hear they’re vicious,” he said.
It didn’t seem like it to me, but I asked Suzanne MacDonald, an animal behaviourist at York University. “They’re not vicious at all,” she said, noting that they roll over and pretend to be dead when facing a real threat, as well as emitting a foul smell like a rotting cadaver — hence the term “playing possum.”
MacDonald said that as the climate changed and became warmer, Virginia opossums, as they are officially known, pushed northward and spread into southern Ontario about 25 years ago. MacDonald said that her guess is that Toronto is home to “many, many thousands” of North America’s only marsupials.
She said we needn’t be afraid of them and should roll out the welcome mat: “They’re scavengers, nature’s cleanup crew. They’ll eat thousands of ticks over a season and we really should be delighted to have them around. How can you not like an animal that eats ticks and road kill?”
I’d like to hear from readers who have had opossum encounters, and please send me photos, if you’ve got them.