‘Flying opossum’ returns from a holiday in Calgary
Rat-like critter wandered into a truck last month and emerged in province that’s never seen his kind
A strange hitchhiker quietly hopped onboard a Brampton truck loaded with retail goods headed for Calgary last month — pink nose, dark beady eyes, prehensile tail and a rat-like mien.
The mode of transportation may have been unusual, but wandering comes naturally to opossums, a marsupial species known to be nomadic and often loners. What doesn’t come naturally is flying, which is how the furry little traveller came home on Friday — on a commercial jet.
It’s not entirely clear how the Brampton opossum got into the truck.
“Potentially, while they were loading it up, he just wandered in at some point and stayed in there until the truck wound up in Calgary,” said Holly Duvall, executive director of the Alberta Institute for Wildlife Conservation, which took in the furry little traveller after a four- or five-day trip west.
When the driver opened up the cargo on Sept. 19, there he was.
“He was a little bit thin. Definitely dehydrated because he hadn’t had access to food for a period of days,” Duvall said.
He spent the rest of September recover- ing at the conservation institute in Calgary, getting rehydrated, gaining a kilo of weight and arranging his travel plans back home. Both the institute and the Toronto Wildlife Centre, which picked up the little critter at Pearson Airport, had to request permits to send the animal across provincial borders.
Staying in Calgary would probably have been lonely.
“We have never admitted an opossum before,” Duvall said. Alberta has no opossum on record yet. The species is relatively new even to Ontario, having made its way up from the United States over the past 50 years or so, says Julia Pietrus of the Toronto Wildlife Centre. Urbanization and a changing climate are part of the attraction.
The Toronto centre admits several opossums every year — often frostbitten because of the bare skin on their tails and feet, she said.
The “flying opossum” will stay with the centre until he’s ready to go back where he came from. By law, the centre is required to release him within a kilometre of the place he was found — or, in this case, the start of his life-altering crosscountry journey.
Where, exactly, that all began is a secret. “
Only because the retailer (to whom the truck belonged) has asked us not to mention them,” said Pietrus.
The Star called several trucking companies in Brampton. One worker said he hadn’t heard of an opossum being found in the company’s trucks, but had had a personal experience with one.
“Those things are vicious; I was trapped in my house by one once,” he said, adding that a bat had flown out of one of the company’s trucks, but no opossum.
Normal behaviour from an opossum may include dropping its mouth open and showing its teeth, said the Toronto centre’s executive director, Nathalie Karvonen.
“A squirrel wouldn’t do that,” she said.
Like many hitchhikers, the opossum may never know his driver or see them again. The donor who funded his flight and the airline bringing him home, too, asked to remain anonymous.
Usually, the visitors the Alberta Institute for Wildlife Conservation gets are sent deliberately, often by offi- cials in the Northwest Territories, Duvall said.
“This guy was just a traveller that ended up here,” she said. “May as well do it while he’s young.”