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Sunday, February 02, 2003

By Scott Shalaway

Daisy, the family's yellow Lab, and I took a brief walk the night after the deep freeze ended. We had cabin fever. For the first time in nearly three weeks, the thermometer reached a balmy 30 degrees, and there were all kinds of interesting sounds coming from the woods. A great horned owl hooted in the distance, and deer moved through the briar patch.

But it was movement near the bird feeders that caught Daisy's attention. She bolted behind the old Christmas tree beneath one of the feeders, barked twice, growled, and then proudly brought me a large mouthful of fur. She dropped it at my feet, waited for the obligatory, "Good girl," then bounded back to the house. I guess she figured she'd done her duty for the night. In the dim light I couldn't identify the object, but I suspected that just moments earlier it had been alive.

	Send questions and comments to Dr. Scott Shalaway, R.D. 5, Cameron, WV 26033 or via e-mail to sshalaway@aol.com, and catch Scott on the radio Saturday afternoons from 2 to 4 p.m. on 1360 WPTT.

After flipping on a flashlight, I recognized the gift. It was a possum, and it seemed dead. But Daisy has gentle jaws, and I could find no puncture wounds or blood. Perhaps it was "playing possum."

So I stepped back and began what could have been a long wait.

An opossum's involuntary reaction to bodily harm is to faint and play dead. Sometimes predators lose interest in motionless prey. The possum's catatonic state can last for hours, and sometimes the heart rate even slows significantly. But on this night the animal stirred in just seven minutes. From its curled fetal position, it first moved its head, then stood. Slowly, it looked around. Surely it would amble off. But no, it just stood there for 15 minutes before finally wandering away.

Since raising a litter of opossums about 10 years ago, they've been among my favorite animals. Though their salt-and-pepper fur is thick and soft, their beady eyes, pointy snouts, and naked tails suggest an overgrown rat. When cornered, they bare their 50 teeth in a pitifully silly-looking snarl. But the ones I raised kept themselves immaculately clean and were surprisingly affectionate.

Though not one of the more beautiful members of the animal kingdom, opossums are survivors. Like kangaroos, they are marsupials -- one of the planet's oldest groups of mammals. Most marsupials live in Australia and South America. The opossum's roots can be traced to South America.

Marsupials differ from other mammals in many ways, but the most familiar is that females carry their young in a pouch. After a brief gestation period, newborn marsupials climb up their mother's abdomen and into her pouch. There they latch onto a nipple and continue to develop out of the womb.

Breeding begins in late February or March. The gestation period for opossums lasts only 13 days. As many as 25 naked, blind, honeybee-sized young then work their way to their mother's pouch, using well-developed forelimbs and claws to climb through her fur.

In the pouch it's first-come, first-served. Females have only 13 nipples, so at most only 13 young survive. Usually, however, only seven or eight make it to the pouch. There they remain for about eight weeks until weaned.

Opossums succeed because they are generalists. They live just about everywhere -- in fields, farmland, marshes, and woods. And they eat almost anything -- fruits, nuts, roots, sunflower seed, insects, eggs and small rodents.

They even eat carrion. That's one reason we see so many road-killed opossums. They spend a lot of time along roads eating the remains of other traffic victims.

Though they remain in their dens for days at a time during bitterly cold weather, opossums do not hibernate. The one Daisy found had probably been holed up for days. Sooner or later, however, they must venture out to eat. This exposes their paper-thin ears and near-naked tails to frostbite. Ragged ears and missing tips of tails remind us where opossums have reached the limits of their ability to survive northern winters. And survive is what possums do best, even when confronted by a 100-pound Lab.