You can say hi, but it still will hiss at you.
I have grub dig holes in my yard I assume are from a possum.
Good to know about the ticks.
You can say hi, but it still will hiss at you.
I have grub dig holes in my yard I assume are from a possum.
Good to know about the ticks.
Looks to me like a pet worth keeping around, despite its rat like appearance.
“Say hi to your friendly neighborhood opossum.”
I say hello ever time I see one with #6 shot. Got one last night.
Had a few mole runs in the yard earlier this year. Bought some poisoned worms ... put them in the runs. That works. The mole will die somewhere in the run and the possums will dig your yard up trying to fine the dead mole.
Guineas will eat ticks, fleas and any other insect they can find, and they WON’T pick at your plants like chickens do. They’ll go after snakes, too.
There’s a possum who strolls thru our carport every night at 9 pm, wanders down the driveway & disappears across the street.
At 10:15 he strolls back thru the carport into the back yard.
You could set a clock by him.
One rainy night, a 6 foot long black snake followed him thru the carport at 9 pm. The possum was nonchalant.
The snake did not follow on the return trek & I never saw it again. But the possum has made his nightly round trip for over 3 years now.
Our cat likes to sit inside the screen door & watch.
Skunks will eat and destroy yellow jackets and their nests.
“ cooperative opossums.”
Can’t say I’ve met many uncooperative opossums .
Guinea fowl do an even better job, give eggs and taste good.
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Get ticks on me all the time. Live in the woods of Virginia. No big deal.
But in 2000, one tick got me - and gave me Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever & almost killed me. RMSF can kill you in 3 days if you are 3 or under or over 50 - I was 55. And it was over a week before they diagnosed me incorrectly but put me on a tetracycline IV that saved my life when I was near death.
Love opossums.
And all this time I thought the survived exclusively on cat food.
I don’t see them as fastidious and cat like. They are vile needle toothed bare tailed creatures who only die on the highway.
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.
We have 2 opossums in our backyard. I don’t know their sexes, but I have named them Opie and Ophelia.
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.)
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!