Recently while we were saying goodnight to a friend in our driveway, a possum ran across the other end of it, briefly breaking into the open as it hurried along the lines of the apartment buildings around us. After that cameo, and after hearing fiddlers Julie Metcalf and Andy Reiner perform a rendition of the folk tune “Raccoon’s Got a Bushy Tail (Possum tail goes bare),” I marveled again at the number and variety of critters we’ve seen or have seen evidence of in the midst of a city that is at times noted for being the most densely populated (with people) municipality in the US.
The urban critters we’ve seen around (and rarely in) our house include:
- Said possum. Or more correctly, said opossum, or more specifically, said Virginia opossum. Technically a possum is a whole other although related marsupial found only in Australia. But try telling that to an opossum who you’ve frightened into “playing possum” or feigning death. He won’t be able to hear you because he’s involuntarily fallen into a coma-like state and is secreting a dead-animal smell in the hopes that you don’t eat dead animals—which you do but even you don’t like them to smell like rotting flesh.
