Country Ecology: Opossum

When I was a kid in Maryland, one of the common things to experience was the family dog bringing home a litter of young opossums. These little marsupials were not going to do well with our desperate husbandry, but we always tried anyway. Cottontail rabbit litters were next on the agenda, but if you had a golden retriever, you were going to receive lots of box turtles and wildlife that you didn’t need from the nearby Maryland woodlands.

For many a year since that Maryland youth, naturalists and wildlife managers in our New England region said you would never see such a southern species as an opossum in New Hampshire; but that has come to pass. The reason for their rationale was that these primitive creatures would not survive frost bite in their non-furred faces and hoary, scaly tails, and therefore not extend their range into New England after some attempts.