Mrs. Cow leaves before dawn each weekday.?ÿ Typically, she stops at the far end of the house (carport) to put out some dry cat food for our little herd of felines.
When I turned on my cell phone to start my day a couple of hours later I discovered she had sent me a text.?ÿ It explained that while feeding the cats she had heard "something" moving inside a large Rubbermaid container a few feet from where she was standing.?ÿ Sometimes when she empties a feed bag she puts it in that container.
This forces me to take a short journey to discover "what" that "something" was.?ÿ I carefully moved the container and noted it was significantly heavier than it should be.?ÿ Finally, I tipped it over and one of the empty cat food bags did not appear to be empty.?ÿ Upon further inspection I learned I was looking at the posterior region of an opossum.?ÿ I was disturbing its slumber, apparently.?ÿ So, I pushed the bag back into the container and sat it upright again.?ÿ How that son of a gun managed to get itself in there without tipping over the container would be fun to see on a game camera, if one had been set up.
The last time I saw it was three miles from my house as I removed the bag from around him/her in a road ditch leading to a small creek where it could find a drink within a couple hundred feet.?ÿ I did not leave it a road map with directions on how to find its way back to my house.
I have a big fat one around here that steals stuff off of my porch at night. SO far he has taken a flip flop, plant leaves, chocolate candy, and who knows what else. ????ÿ
We have one that likes to climb along the top of the wood fence that goes between all the houses in our subdivision, no alleys. Anyway, he walks along the tops of the pickets and my dog can "hear" the dang thing while in the house with the tv on and absolutely LOSES HIS MIND!! I'll open the back door and our dog is GONE in a flash and barking up the fence but the opossum isn't phased even the slightest. It's really quite comical.
I've posted this before, but it is just so appropriate here ...
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When I was on a rampage to kill every squirrel within 500' of my house I inadvertently caught a 'possum in a Havahart trap. SWMBO told me if one squirrel was harmed I would be as well. So for you PETA types the squirrels were relocated unharmed to a local wildlife reserve.
Anyway I picked the trap up, opened the trap and set it back down. Of course the Possum was pointed the wrong way and couldn't turn around. After much thought I concluded he or she was too stupid to walk backwards and picked up the cage to "shake" it out. That didn't work so I set it in the shade and waited to see how long it would take the thing to back out. After about 10 minutes I became bored and went about whatever SWMBO told me to. About two hours later she's hollering at me the Possum's dead and it's my fault, of course. I told her it would have fell out of the trap if it was dead. So she slices up an apple and puts it alongside the trap and left it alone. A few minutes later the critter backs out, eats the apple and disappears.?ÿ I have never seen a possum behave like that in the daytime. Now I wonder if it was rabid. Didn't act it. ?????ÿ
I have seen one walking down the power lines here.?ÿ Rats do that too to stay away from the cats.
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