Things that go bump in the night....
Awakened... by a noise. A thump. Funny how senses are so quickly armed; hearing acute, hair on the back of my neck (or back, which is becoming more substantial) on end, eyes used to the darkness and peering outside my window within seconds of the sound. Seeing nothing I convinced myself that it was debris from the palm tree in our enclosed patio. Minutes later I started to hear a clunking and scratching that was much to obvious to be a person. So I picked up a flashlight and peered once again out the patio door to see what was stuck in our "jungle" as we call it. Well, the 3 foot grey/flesh-colored tail sticking out from between two flower pots next to the fence was a dead give away. Perhaps the largest, maybe even record-breaking opossum was trying to dig under the fence and make a clean escape from the trap it had fallen into. I turned the outdoor light on and shined the flashlight directly at in in a vain attempt to scare it into running... to..I don't know where. But this seemed only to encourage it to meander toward the light and crawl up onto one of the patio chairs. And knock it over.
Beginning to click down the options for helping my new friend (I will spare you the thoughts about the shovel and the garbage can), I found myself wondering if this was really a rodent of unusual size prop that wandered out of the fire swamp. Or maybe a small gray bear. And remembering quotes from The Beverly Hillbillies...How do you like yer possum, Lowell, fallin' off the bones tender or with a little fight left in it? .. It ain't good to show up at Gloria Swanson's house with a half-baked possum! He was quite a handsome specimen if ever there was one. His gray ...fur.. coat whatever it is was very full, clean and fluffy. As he wandered around the patio he seemed almost sanguine. As though he had been in a rut before and would get out of this difficult spot too.
Perhaps a wait and see policy for now. He wandered back to digging under the fence, which is eight feet tall, so I understood his hesitation at scaling the obstacle but wondered if he was going to tire himself out before he could figure out he had to crawl over the fence to escape.
But after one more stare at the lights, he did start crawling over the fence. And inch by inch made it over the fence, to the roof and the palm tree on the front side of the house. Having escaped his temporary he must be off to do what opossums do:
POSSUMS ARE EXTREMELY BENEFICIAL
Unlike raccoons which you do not want hanging around your home, possums are generally considered to be very beneficial animals. They may not be as pretty to look at, but their habits are much cleaner. Possums are nature's all-natural exterminators:
They eat most of the pests you don't want around your house like cockroaches, rats and mice, slugs and snails, beetles, crane flies and moths
Possums kill thousands of ticks each season
They eat carrion (dead animals)
Possums don't pass rabies
Possums don't pass Lyme disease
Possums don't destroy lawns or property
Possums are intelligent, shy and gentle, not aggressive
Immune to rattlesnake, cottonmouth, and copperhead venom, they have value in the development of antivenom