Wildlife

I like possums (okay, technically opossums I guess). I know I'm in the minority on that one. Most people think they're creepy. But I had an experience with one in Bloomington that changed my thinking. We had one crawling with difficulty across our backyard one day and I called the local wildlife rescue folks about it. They sent a woman out to take a look, and she told me a lot about possums I didn't know. First, they are very gentle. She demonstrated this by picking this possum up with her bare hands. She suspected the poor thing had a broken leg from being hit by a car. The possum was very docile, it just let her hold her and investigate. The woman had me pet her and see her prehensile tail, which was pretty neat. They also are "nature's sanitary workers" - as she called them. They will eat just about anything. She said they love compost, which is probably why that possum was so well fed, we had a nice compost pile in Bloomington. She said they are very clean, they take care of themselves like cats. So I was sold. The woman took the possum with her where she said she would get her fixed up and release her back to the wild.

Living out in the country now of course we have possums here too. But we don't see them much because they mostly come out at night. Kris had an experience with one recently when he took our kitchen scraps out to the garden and dumped them on what he thought was the remains of Stian's jack-o-lattern only to realize he had dumped them on top of a possum that was about three feet away from him.

For some reason though we have a possum that has recently started wandering into our yard in the daytime. We've seen him (her?) several times during the day now. He seems to be loving out compost pile. He'll sit and munch or grab something that appears to especially exciting and head back to the woods. Kris threw out some old hamburger buns the other day for the possum, and that was a big hit. So we've all been enjoying watching his ventures up into the yard. Stian likes to watch him too.



Admit it, he's really kind of cute, isn't he?

We also have quite the herd of deer. They tend to come up out of the woods in the evening and head across the street to the field for dinner (I once counted something like 82 deer in the field across from our house at one time). I know we've mentioned them on here before. They are very fun to watch as well. Stian especially likes keeping an eye out during dinner to see them coming out of the woods and crossing our yard. One of Stian's first words was "deer". Here's a picture Kris took the other evening of a few deer in the fog.