Opossums Under and in the House

Re: “Playing Possums: They’re Not Serious” (Jan. 2): I chuckled last year as momma opossum strolled along our block wall fence, laden with her burden of seven babies on her back, (and I) called the grandchildren to hurry, come and see the opossums. How cute. We even named the little critters, and they became a topic at social occasions. Winston and Winchell and the rest of the gang were growing as they visited most every night to see if there were any good morsels in the trash.

Then I moved down the street a few houses into a larger place with hardwood floors and a crawl space under the house. The first night I saw a rather large opossum stroll down the front walk like he owned the place. I thought, how cute; I wonder if this critter was our grown-up Winston or Winchell or one of the brothers or sisters from momma’s large litter of last year?

Well, the opossums ceased to be cute when the weather grew cold and they proceeded to set up housekeeping under the house, next to the heater. And last week, one of the opossums decided it wasn’t warm enough down there and decided to come in the house at 11:30 p.m. via the clean-out access for the bathtub in the utility room.

Suddenly this was a very active household as Winston, Winchell or Minerva decided to come out from behind the washer and see what could be midnight snack in the nearby trash. After a harrowing 30 minutes on top of the washer in my nightie convincing the menacing, snapping, loudly insulted opossum back into the hole it had so rudely entered by and blocking it up with enough wood to keep Gen. Sherman’s cavalry out, we attempted to contact Orange County Animal Control and our landlord to see how to remove our unwanted friends.

You are right, Animal Control wants nothing to do with removing the opossums. They did send the landlord plans to build a cage to catch the opossums, so we can call Animal Control to come and pick them up and, I quote from your article: “The county policy is to release the captured animal in the same general area where found.” Really!

Is the county afraid to break up that “old gang of mine?” In the meantime, I have an unknown number of opossums residing under the house, making noise if we make too much noise, the possibility of germs, fleas, breeding, biting one of my grandchildren, and now the knowledge that if I do happen to catch one of them, it will be returned to the same general area where it was captured.

Think of it, if momma has seven more babies this year and each of her last year’s litter has seven babies each, add the big (poppa) that started it all and we could conceivably have 100 opossums on our block this year.

I wonder how many are living at the next door neighbor’s.

SHARON BALDWIN

Orange