The Virginia opossum’s most shining historical moment dawned in the post–Revolutionary War era, when Thomas Jefferson found a metaphor for his young country in the animal’s “heroic” tenacity and maternal devotion. It wasn’t until the beginning of the twentieth century that humans began to revert to a Dark Ages mentality regarding opossums, a mind-set that is particularly marked in modern urban dwellers.
More than any other mammal I have ever studied, opossums inspire an abhorrence that is both unapologetic and unqualified. It’s not like the raccoon: “I can’t stand them, but they are so cute with those masks, and clever.” Or rats or crows: “I hate them, but I know they are superintelligent, and I respect that.” Or even pigeons: “Pigeons suck, but they don’t really hurt anything.” Most people feel no impulse whatsoever to soften their revulsion for opossums; the right—almost obligation—to dislike opossums appears to have evolved into an obvious given, an a priori truth of the urban wilderness. Preferred descriptors include icky, nasty, vicious, and pointy. In response to an opossum post on a popular urban-homesteading blog, one reader wrote, “Nasty, ugly, giant rat-looking critters. Yuck.” And another: “I’m an animal lover, but possums give me the creeps. I say, any means necessary with those guys.” And another, whose online moniker happens to be Serenity Love: “Hit them with your car. They are nasty vicious creatures. Back up over them to make sure they are dead.”* Looking for an opinion that I could be sure came from an informed source, I turned to a friend of mine, an award-winning journalist for a major paper who writes primarily about science and nature and has a regular column on the appreciation of local wildlife. “Opossums?” She wrinkled her nose. “Icky. Icky-pointy.”
I knew I could count on my dear writer friend David Laskin to shed some light on this curious problem of opossum perception. He hadn’t even gone upstairs to look at my daughter’s new gerbils because, well, he was “not that fond of rodents.” So I was quite sure he would have some opossum thoughts to share. Opossums, of course, are not rodents, but there persists a curious sensibility, even among those who know better (most people), that it’s still appropriate to think of them somehow as rodents (maybe it’s the ratlike tail). In any case, David did not disappoint. This is what he told me:
“Oh, I hate possums! They are worse than rats, and I really hate rats. At least rats are good at being ratty—dirty and sneaky and scary, and you have to respect them for that, sort of like coyotes. But possums are pure ick. They seem dumb, they are scary-looking; if you corner one they seem dangerous. I hate their tails. I hate their blobbiness, and they just freak me out.”
This was more than I’d hoped for. But David wasn’t finished: “I don’t like their size. Rats are small, and you get the feeling they could just slither away, and raccoons—you know I don’t care much for raccoons—are bigger than possums, but at least their fur is sort of beautiful. Possums are just big and gross. There’s too much of them.” And he offered: “The fact that people actually eat them, you know, possum stew? That grosses me out.”* David is one of the most eloquent writers I know, so it is gratifying to hear him use phrases like “grosses me out.”
After this long, inspired, and probably tiring anti-opossum diatribe, David paused. “I guess it’s cool that they can hang from their tails,” he proffered, thinking perhaps that he’d offended me with all of his possum loathing. I love that the one thing he can find to like about the opossum isn’t even true. They do have prehensile tails, and they use them a lot as they climb. An opossum can dangle by its tail for a few moments while it reaches for a branch with one of its feet, which is very handy if you are a mother opossum climbing a tree with a passel of opossum kits on your back. But opossums are too heavy to actually hang for very long by their tails, as they do in cartoons and in our imaginations. They can carry things with their tails, usually leaves and grasses to be used in lining their dens or nests. It’s a winsome image, really: the tail coiled around a bunch of leaves, and the opossum scampering (insofar as an opossum can scamper) away with her treasure, then using her icky-pointy nose to tuck the leaves into a rounded nest, either in a protected earthen corner or in a tree. So after this, David made one more kindly effort. “Don’t they have a pouch or something?” I was very excited about opossums at the time of our conversation, so I jumped right in with some little factoids, surely more than he wanted to know. “Yes! The marsupium! And the pouch is so extraordinary, it’s all soft and fur-lined, and the mother possum can actually swim with her young in the pouch, and it will stay so nicely sealed around them that they won’t get wet!” I couldn’t have imagined a better response from David: “Eeew! They swim? Great, something else to be scared of.”
What I value most about David’s anti-opossum polemic, besides its impressive unrelentingness, is its representativeness. These are the exact things that most people don’t like about opossums. And David hit something bang-on with his repeated use of seem. Opossums “seem dumb,” and they “seem dangerous.” We have to use seem with opossums, because we know so little about them. They are nocturnal, we rarely see them, and we don’t like them, so we are singularly unmotivated to find out what’s really true about them and what is not. Regarding opossum intelligence, I have often wondered over it myself. They certainly don’t appear to be terribly clever, so myopic and ponderous, laboring about the street and hedge edges in the dark. (They are not actually myopic, though they are slow; top speed is a few miles per hour, with the tail spinning for balance.) But combing the scientific literature, I discovered that opossums are moderately to highly intelligent, ranking above domestic dogs on task tests. They are believed to be about as intelligent as pigs, and who knows what sort of unexpected, unlooked-for intelligence their nocturnal opossum lives require—unique opossum intelligence we as yet fail to imagine.*
Opossum survival is always a wary prospect. The initial journey of the pea-size embryo from internal uterus to external pouch is a perilous one, and up to a quarter of the miniature opossums will die before weaning. Of those that survive, fewer than 10 percent will live even one year. There is a long-standing myth regarding opossum reproduction that still persists, even on some (not very good, to say the least) natural-history websites: that copulation takes place through the female’s nose. The babies are so small when born, and birth usually takes place in the dark, where it is difficult to witness; opossum reproduction remained, in lay circles, little understood until the past century. One day, the uncorroboratable story goes, someone observed a captive opossum female pushing her nose around in her pouch, as they will do when young are present, and she also sneezed a couple of times. Upon examination, the observer found the pouch full of several tiny babies. The fallacy was substantiated by the astonishing fact of the male opossum’s penis, which is bifurcated and strongly forked at the end, with two avenues for ejaculation (which of course has led to the animal being considered a prophylactic against impotence, and its member ground and made into a serum in parts of Central and South America). I cannot help but think of Shel Silverstein’s lyrics about a young man specially endowed with two membra virile:
They say that Stacy Brown was born just a little bit deformed Still his girlfriends they all wake up smilin’ every morn…
And are the female opossums smiling? Well, they do seem to grin with their long snouts, but the females themselves have bifurcated uteruses, adapted precisely for the males’ attentions, so perhaps it doesn’t seem particularly novel to them. Didelphis, the opossum’s scientific genus name, means “dual womb.” This, coupled with the fact of the bifurcated penis, obviously created by “divine design” to fit into the two nostrils, led to the persistent myth: that opossum insemination occurs through the female nostrils, from whence the young are sneezed out into the pouch.
Being a marsupial, the opossum gives birth to the tiniest of babies—embryos, really, almost completely undeveloped, and each the size of a dried navy bean. These tiny pups make their way into the mother opossum’s pouch in their first two minutes outs
ide the womb, crawl into the pouch, and attach themselves to one of the thirteen teats. The nipples expand within the pups’ mouths, and they all remain there, attached and growing, until they peek over the fold of the pouch at about thirty days and eventually emerge, very small and—dare I suggest it?—cute, at about two months. Surviving young continue to hold fast to the mother’s belly or back for some months to come, and she is a protective, attentive mother.*
Adult opossums rarely live more than two years. That’s not very long for a mammal of that size, scarcely as long as a field mouse. The size of the opossum actually plays a significant role in adult mortality. It’s hard to be a medium-small mammal, especially one that can’t run to speak of. An opossum is too big to slither away like a rat. It cannot move fast enough to get across the street when caught in the road by a night-passing car, and especially not when disoriented by the glare of headlights. (Why did the chicken cross the road? To prove to the opossum it could be done.) But it is also not big enough to deter predators. A coyote will think twice about eating a raccoon, but an opossum is just the right size. Same goes for the larger hawks, owls, eagles, and dogs, with dogs being the number-one cause of opossum death in urban and suburban places, outranking even automobiles. Tens of thousands of opossums are trapped each year, but their pelts are of little value—worth less than fifty cents each—and in recent decades, the majority of opossum pelts have remained unsold. Those that are sold trim inexpensive clothing or are exported for the manufacture of cheap teddy bears.
I believe that one of the problems with our modern opossum perception lies in the fact of our opposing circadian rhythms. David Laskin mentioned the opossum’s nighttime wandering as a source of his own dis-ease with the animal: “I dislike their nocturnalness,” he told me. “You only see them when you’re really stressed out.” I had no idea what this meant, but David explained. “You know, when you are up worrying about an article you have to write, or a review you know someone is writing of your book, or whatever, that’s when you see a possum. In the dark, like your fear.”
It’s true. They are from another kind of world, the night world, the place where in both mythology and psychology our own human anxieties are magnified, where we feel a sense of mystery, a lack of rationality, an inability to know our own footing. The opossum doubtlessly feels the same when it stumbles unwittingly into our world. A quiet, nocturnal animal beneath a bright electric light and a shrieking human or an aggressive dog or a wandering urban coyote or even a mob of crows? Such moments inspire one of the opossum’s most singular behaviors.
When it finds itself in the most dire of circumstances, an opossum will fall into a state that mimics, for all the world, sudden death. This zoological strategy is not uncommon in insects, but it is rare in mammals. The goal is to make your adversary believe that you are already dead, and perhaps even beginning to rot, so that it will leave you alone, not kill you and eat you. To this end, the opossum lies perfectly still and seemingly stiff, with its eyes closed; eventually, a musky, death-scented liquid will ooze from its mouth and the glands near the anus. This state will last for some minutes at least, and up to several hours. Though the opossum appears utterly still, and you cannot even see the movement of breath in the breast, the opossum’s metabolism does not actually slow. Eventually, the possum will twist its soft black ears all around, listening, and sniff the air. It will lift its funny head ever so slightly and have a peek around. When it deems all is well, it will amble off to perceived safety, no faster than usual.
In cross-cultural opossum symbolism and mythology, playing possum is the predominant theme. When humans take on this behavior, playing dead in response to external stimuli, the psychological term is dissociation—to be disconnected, negatively separate. Regarding opossums, it seems, this is exactly what we do ourselves: we play possum, we dissociate by responding to a creature based mainly on the one factor that we teach our children is a superficial trait by which to judge a thing—its appearance. It is not my intent to make everyone like opossums; I hope we might simply rethink them. Instead of relegating opossums to the hated thing beneath human notice, why not expansively and intentionally recognize them, allow their presence in the community of beings worthy of awareness and consideration? We don’t have to do anything differently, except maybe stop calling them names (I agree with Gary Snyder, who argues for maintaining politeness toward wild animals at all times, as they may be listening; we don’t know what the consequences could be and should in any case behave ourselves.) The steps to avoiding conflict are small and simple and exactly the same as the things we must do to coexist calmly with most wild neighborhood creatures: bring in the pet food, close up the garbage cans. If we do these things and still manage to see opossums now and then, we can watch with a benevolent curiosity. They are quiet, gentle, strange, pouched, misunderstood beings in our midst. It might seem ecologically insignificant, but I am convinced it would mean something tremendous if we could look at opossums and conclude that yes, they are pointy and decidedly uncute, that their tails are not nicely furred, and that they make us feel a little uncomfortable, but that even so, the presence of actual marsupials co-inhabiting our neighborhoods is an astonishing, wondrous thing—something to watch for, wonder over, learn about. And remembering that they won’t hurt us, or our cats, or our dogs, why not have an opossum in the yard? What if we expanded our moral and practical imaginations to include a marsupial with such a pointed nose?
One night, I got out of bed at 2:00 a.m. to pee. Tom was traveling for work in Mozambique, so Claire and I were alone in the house under a full moon. I had insomnia that night and didn’t mind getting up—it gave me something to do besides lying awake in bed. While in the bathroom, I lifted the light, faded curtain I’d made from a scarf we brought home from India and looked out to see the moon. There, in the middle of our street, illumined in equal measure by streetlamp and moonlight, ambled an opossum. She appeared to be making her way across the road, but when she reached the middle, she stopped. She sat on her possum rump and lifted her face to the sky, blinking in the moonlight. And there she stayed for several minutes before slowly getting back up on all four feet and walking, with the most absolute lack of hurry I have ever seen, to the far sidewalk.
I paused over the randomness of this vision; if I hadn’t thought to peek beneath the curtain, the opossum would still have been there, the moon-watching opossum, unseen, with me on the other side of the curtain, in my near-constant ignorance of the wild life that surrounds me, thinking only of how I might get to sleep. How constant and present and continual, and how strange, the community of beings.
Squirrel (and Rat)
Life in the World Tree
No creature demonstrates the human schizophrenia regarding urban wildlife better than the squirrel. In studies of backyard wildlife, squirrels rank as both the most desirable and attractive animal and the most hated nuisance animal. We love squirrels when they are jumping, eating, washing their faces in that adorable catlike way. We love them when they eat the peanuts we put out for them, sitting up on their haunches, so round and fluffy. We love them when they stretch themselves out on a limb and let their legs dangle, napping extravagantly. We love them, sometimes, when they are just running up and down the tree or across the street, carrying bits of chestnut or apple, enlivening the neighborhood and our lives. We hate them when they nest in the attic and wake us at five in the morning with their scratchings and squeakings. We hate them when, after eating from our hands so sweetly for three months, they suddenly one day bite our fingers. We hate them when they nip the blossoms from our cherry trees, unearth our tulip bulbs, and nibble our garden squash. More than anything, we hate them when they eat all the expensive black oil sunflower seeds we put out for different wildlife.
Squirrel strife is nothing new. Ratatoskr is a squirrel in Norse mythology, and though the story is ancient, the squirrel is entirely familiar. Ratatoskr spends his days running up and down Yggdrasil, the World Tree, usually depicted as a gor
geous, sweeping ash. This tree isn’t just located at the center of the world, she is the center of the world, and she overlaps the prominent image of the Tree of Life found in religion, mythology, shamanic lore, and even scientific literature across times and cultures. At the end of The Origin of Species, Darwin invokes the familiar Tree of Life image as a metaphor for branching evolutionary relationships to ease his theories into a not-quite-ready world. The squirrel Ratatoskr carries messages from an unnamed eagle in the top branches of the World Tree to the dragonlike wyrm Níðhöggr, who lives curled in its roots. Many other creatures dwell in the branches and roots and on the ground beneath the tree, the whole scene evoking a kind of peaceable kingdom, with the squirrel as its lively interworld messenger, running up and down and up again. The story, I read in various commentaries, speaks to the ongoing conversation between heaven and earth, with the squirrel symbolizing our essential connectedness to both these realms.
But delving a bit deeper into Norse cosmology, I discovered a more nuanced portrait. The messages that Ratatoskr bore were mostly insults hurled at the wyrm from the eagle. “Scaly, insipid beast!” And Ratatoskr means “drill-tooth.” He is sometimes pictured with a horn growing out of his forehead, a sort of rodent unicorn, and with this or with his teeth, he bores incessantly into the tree. Some sources picture a wounded Yggdrasil chewed up and down one side by the sharp-toothed Ratatoskr. And the tree itself? It turns out that she spends much of her day grumbling away, annoyed to distraction by the wild denizens that make their home among her roots and branches. A mean-spirited eagle; a sad dragon; a tree-killing, insult-passing squirrel; and, at the center of the universe, a very crabby tree. Some peaceable kingdom.
The Urban Bestiary Page 9