Metro to Mountain Journal

The other day while working in the backyard I saw an opossum on my neighbors roof. Intrigued I watched him for a while and even took a couple of pictures. When I told my neighbor about the sighting, he asked if we had trouble with opossums too? No, we have a big dog, Jake.

This episode reminded me of a story about my mother in-law from a few years back...

On a visit with Diane, she told her daughter and me of the trouble she was having with raccoons in her garden. She just couldn’t get rid of them.

We told her that we had a "havahart" trap she could use. She was willing to try anything.

On our next visit we brought the trap and showed her how to use it. Simple, put some food in it and the trap does the rest.

The very next day she called and said she had trapped a raccoon but he looked really bad. He was really sick.

After work we headed back to her house. On the way we discussed what we should do with the captured raccoon. We would bring him home and then take him to the animal control offices. Since it was a raccoon that was caught in the daytime, we figured He was probably rabid so we had better be really careful. This was not going to be fun at all.

On arriving at her house she sent us down to get the raccoon. She did not even want to look at the sick critter.

Cautiously we entered the garden and approached the cage. Seeing the back side of the raccoon we saw he had a wiry looking tail. Oh my, it must have really been sick. Walking around the cage, the raccoon came into full view. We both started laughing. Belly laughing. Having to hold each other up, laughing. The reason the raccoon looked so sickly was because it was not a raccoon at all, it was an opossum!

We were relieved it was not a sick opossum.

Happy opossum trails.