A Home for a
So-far Harmless Possum
by Mariana Greene
Back to In the Spotlight | Back to Home
Howard the possum needs glasses. Or maybe he needs survivor lessons. I'm worried about his seeming naïveté.
I was refereeing an argument one night between the old hens and the youngsters. It was the chickens' bedtime, not yet fully dark. The younger chickens were trying to avoid being locked in their roost because two of the older hens were, as usual, terrorizing them by pecking them. For no good reason.
I heard a rustling noise and there was Howard padding along the top of the cedar fence, toward me and the fussing chickens. He paid us no mind but climbed from the top of the fence, up the chicken wire that encloses the roost and across the wooden lattice that is the roof of the chicken run. He was just inches above my head; I could have tickled the bottoms of his tiny pink feet that showed through the lattice openings.
I forgot about the chickens and watched Howard go from the roof of the henhouse and up wrist-thick wisteria vines to even thicker tree limbs, until he found a comfortable crotch in the large, old ash tree. There he perched for some minutes, giving himself a bath like a cat that's just finished supper.
He was silhouetted against a starlit sky that still showed some blue. I squinted through a diamond-shape opening in the lattice, my head craned back as far as it would go, and watched until my neck muscles began to spasm. I wanted to see if Howard would disappear into a hollow of the old tree, tortured into an unnatural V at the top by utility workers with chainsaws.
After I succeeded in corralling the chickens and latching their cage, I looked among the boughs for Howard. But he had disappeared. He wasn't stationed at the squirrel feeder across the yard, either.
I first spotted Howard late last summer, cowering in the chicken coop under the fearsome glare and puffed feathers of affronted hens who had retired to their boudoir for the night.
Howard was a tiny white ball of fur small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. He had innocently (I believe, considering his size) wandered into the roost looking for uneaten hen scratch.
My husband rescued him from the angry hens and released him in the back yard. The encounter didn't run him off, however, and I worried that when the cute baby opossum matured it would turn the tables on the garden chickens. By eating them while they slept.
A few readers beseeched me to learn more about the opossum's gentle nature, while acknowledging the wild creature could harbor the instinct to covet a chicken dinner or at least steal their eggs. Opossums do not carry rabies, they wrote, do not dig in the garden and are not aggressive. They tidy up the place by eating insects, rotting fruits and vegetables and roadkill.
Howard is afraid of the house dogs, but he allows me to approach the squirrel feeder mounted on the fence, even when he's sitting on it.
Sometimes when I step out the back door with a few possum tidbits Howard's already there, eating kernels of dried corn and peanuts. He stops chewing and looks at me with a resigned expression while I creep to the feeder to deposit bits of baked potato or dried fruit on its tray.
He has matured from fluffy white to dingy gray, but his sweet face is heart-shaped. Even in the dark his still-snowy face shines like a beacon.
You'll say I've read too many storybooks by Beatrix Potter. The same readers who e-mail me recipes for squirrel stew will roll their eyes.
But I'm pleased to have Howard as a lodger. Emergency vehicles blare down the street behind me all through the night. Thieves needing a drug fix shatter car windows routinely in my neighborhood to steal radios. I drive by homeless people with nowhere warm to go every day on my way to work.
Howard strikes me as a creature who means no harm. My garden, to him, is a haven. Why can't we all just get along? Hear that, chickens?
REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS.