Tropical Possum Night

Posted on April 23, 2007
Filed Under life | 11 Comments


Tropical Possum Night

Originally uploaded by evilgenius.

We heard scritching in the attic a few days ago, and I went up with a flashlight and saw a possum in the corner. We got a cage trap, and baited it with tuna. Tonight I saw that it had been tripped and that some of the tuna was gone. Because of the way it was closed, I figured that the little possum might have been able to squeeze out. I redid the closing back brackets a different way and reset it.

About an hour later, we heard a big bang from the attic. I checked, and sure enough we had trapped the little booger. We drove him down by the river and let him go in the woods. At least we tried to. It took several minutes from the point the cage was opened to get the thing to actually leave. Finally it did go and went tearing off.

We went home and just for good measure reset the trap. I didn’t really expect to catch anything else. Five minutes later, we caught another one! We took it back to the same spot and let it go. Even now we can hear another one up there, so this might be a long night of shuttling possums back and forth to the woods.

Update: PS – it wasn’t until I got home and looked at this photo that I realized I let the possum go right in a patch of poison ivy. I’m lucky I didn’t get any on me.

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  • Comments

    11 Responses to “Tropical Possum Night”

    1. matt on April 24th, 2007 4:35 am

      Maybe it’s the same possum, holding on to the bottom of the car back to the house, running back up into the roof and into the trap again ;)

    2. Andre on April 24th, 2007 8:20 am

      Gotta love those Conway opossum’s!

    3. Dom Barnes on April 24th, 2007 8:47 am

      Maybe its his evil twin..
      Either way, that possum is strangely cute and ferocius at the same time.
      Well done on the catch!

    4. dave on April 24th, 2007 12:30 pm

      I checked the trap this morning, and there was a third one in there. This is becoming a second career.

      The picture is of the first one which was the smallest of the three. It was kind of cute in a way, and the little one was by far the most ferocious. The other two just moped off.

    5. Ken Kennedy on April 24th, 2007 1:38 pm

      3 cheers for you, Dave, for not just whacking the little guys!

    6. Garrick Van Buren on April 24th, 2007 2:40 pm

      Back at our apt in Evanston, there was a possum living in our back stairs on the way to the common laundry room. The hissing made an unpleasant chore even more so.

    7. dave on April 24th, 2007 7:49 pm

      Andre, I did my best to keep them still in Conway, just not near my house. Dang son, I just read about you in the Weekly Surge!

      Ken, it’s not really any more trouble this way than killing them. You still have to get rid of them one way or the other, and alive they can go on their own steam.

      Garrick, we had a lot of critters in Evanston too. There were rabbits in our backyard. We’ve lived in country farmhouses, but in Evanston is the one place our dog got skunked.

      Who knew that my post about a possum would light up the comments like this?

    8. Grand Strand Residents and Bloggers, Pipe Up! : Evil Genius Chronicles on April 24th, 2007 8:45 pm

      [...] Hey there, you residents of the Grand Strand. I’m asking a favor of you. If you do live in the area, leave me a comment on this post. If you also have your own blog, leave the URL to it in the comment, please. This is a one time request, after which you can resume lurking if you like. I got really curious about how many people reading this blog live in this area after I noticed that a recent commentor is the same guy I just read about in the Weekly Surge. [...]

    9. Chris C. on May 3rd, 2007 12:44 pm

      Great picture!

      That’s not actually poison ivy though. Trust me, I know what it looks like, that’s not it. It doesn’t have that fine sawtooth edge, and the leaves spread in triplets.

    10. Sharon L. on May 3rd, 2007 1:07 pm

      Not to mention the Captain Beefheart riff.

    11. dave on May 3rd, 2007 7:48 pm

      Chris, thanks. On further review, you are correct.

      Sharon! Holy cow, nice to see you here. I’m surprised that Chris didn’t mention that. “It’s like two possums in a fruit fight!”

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