I hand-raised a litter from in-the-pouch (mom hit-by-car) successfully and released them to the wild, and can verify that this is what they look like as they get ready to release:
Posted on 06/18/2020 3:47:56 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
I got a family of opossums that breed in one of my sheds each year. Gentle beasts. If I encounter the babies left behind after the mom leaves. I just grab them by the tail, take em outside and encourage them to go up into the trees. they like to climb. I know they eat ticks and get into my garbage some times, cute looking things.
There’s a Possum Kingdom in South Carolina - it’s kind of a suburb of Ware Place (that helps, right?). Not real sure of their tic situation, though.
Whoda thunk a thread on ticks would have so many posts?
My humane trap certainly caught a small skunk in back yard.
Cute animal, but I covered the cage in plastic bag and released the critter in far away woods.
Chickens also eat ticks, or possums also eat chickens?
In the mid-late afternoon of calm days, we have an entire squadron of mosquitoes patrolling back and forth over our front yard-—Dozens and dozens of them
We have 2 opossums in our backyard. I don’t know their sexes, but I have named them Opie and Ophelia.
I hand-raised a litter from in-the-pouch (mom hit-by-car) successfully and released them to the wild, and can verify that this is what they look like as they get ready to release:
Possums love Meeow Mix.
I have a regular...comes around every night for leftovers.
I had pet possums and can verify this.
Saw a dead deer exactly where I’d seen one earlier and thought “those guys really have to stop taking road-crossing advice from opossums”.
Old joke:
“Politics”. From “poly”, meaning many, and “ticks”, a blood sucking arachnid.
As far as the opossums eating ticks go, well, an acre can turn over tens of thousands of ticks in the warm part of the year. Esp. those dang deer ticks. Better have a family of ‘possums. And very well secured chickens.
(I really suspect that even without vulnerable chickens, in most cases opossums can do a lot better than hunting deer ticks. But the opossums might cut the numbers of ticks somewhat.)
And snakes think they have quite the reputation with their forked tongues... ;-)
Rereading that, it sounds to me as if the opossums eat ticks that get on the 'possum.
However, the numbers cited (5k in a year) are not totally insane.
Assumptions:
200 day tick season.
Opossum picks up 25 ticks a day, in a badly tick infested acre. (Heck, I had an episode as a kid where I ran through a field on an often used path (by us kids) and picked up over 100 ticks in under 5 minutes. It was almost like a nightmare with this army of ticks crawling up my legs & me pulling them off just fast enough to keep them from reaching the bottom edge of my shorts!)
200 x 25 = 5000 ticks.
Yeeesshh!
they are cute. Mom tends to leave them behind every year. They don’t bother much but some times get into the chicken feed.
Opossums don’t go scavenging for ticks, they groom those that are on them.
I’ve seen articles like this posted on neighborhood boards where envirowackjobs are trying to argue for no human intervention in wildlife (despite leaving out food for feral cats, which only attracts vermin, possums included).
For whatever reason, they love opossums. I don’t, and when they get in my yard, my dogs and I make sure they don’t come back.
Insecticide works better. ;)
Step up the grub treatments! (Grubx,Milky spore & BT!) Nothing worse than Grub mines AND skunk scat! (Filled with half digested beetles. yuck!)
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