You wake up from your slumber. The moonlight illuminates the landscape. You round up your babies and head out to round up dinner for the night. Being nocturnal, your activity is almost exclusively limited to night.
You exit the tree line and head out onto the hard surface before you. You don’t have time to react as the two glowing orbs approach you and the last thing you see is blinding light.
This is the fate of many of America’s only marsupial, the opossum.
The same is true of a set of local opossums … sort of.
Petunia and Penelope are the only two surviving joeys of a litter of five. Their mother was hit by a car.
However, Columbus Animal Control agents happened to be at the site on a separate call and witnessed the incident, a move that saved the two critters.
“Animal control was out rescuing a puppy, and while they were trying to get the puppy, they saw an opossum get hit on the road,” said Patricia Gann, Petunia and Penelope’s surrogate mother. “Luckily they went and checked the pouch. There were five babies and two were alive.”
Thinking quickly on their feet and knowing that Gann ran a rescue, the agents called her and the rest is history.
This led to a lifetime bond with Gann: an opossum lifetime, anyway.
“They were so young that I had to tube feed them,” she said. “When they are that young and they get acclimated to people, you can’t release them. Their lifespan is not very long anyway. It’s a year in the wild and two years, maybe two and a half years, in captivity.”
However, the two marsupials are making the most of what little time they have here and in a big way.
Columbus Mayor Keith Gaskin announced Saturday that Petunia and Penelope were to become the official ambassadors for the city during the Turkey Pardoning ceremony.
“We want them to be the official ambassadors of Columbus and help us with promoting the city and ‘Pick it up Possum Town,’ and just to educate people about wildlife,” Gaskin said. “We thought it was a fun way to educate people, but also it’s a serious topic. They are not designed to be pets. They need to be handled by somebody that is professional.”
Possum Town was the name given to Columbus in the early 1800s before the to was officially incorporated. The name was the result of Spirus Roach, a local trader whose long, pointed nose led those who traded with him to call him Possum.
Gann actually reached out to Gaskin after seeing his Mayor Possum Puppet, the mascot for his “Don’t be a Litter Critter” campaign, on social media.
He jumped at the chance to meet the two survivors and decided to partner with Gann and her opossums.
“She invited me out to see them and I went,” Gaskin said. “What we decided to do was let people know about what good critters these are in the community. A lot of people have misconceptions about opossums, and so we decided we were going to partner up and start doing an educational program on opossums too. We thought, ‘What better place to do it than Possum Town, right?’”
Good friends in nature
Gann conspicuously carried her two opossums on her shoulders Saturday, jarring imagery for dispeling one of the most common myths about the creatures.
“They cannot carry diseases,” she said. “A lot of people ask about Rabies. Their body temperature is too low and it couldn’t survive. They cannot give you any diseases, nor your pets.
Still, Gann said while opossums are beneficial in many ways, they are best enjoyed from afar. She raised the two opossums from babies, and as such they are used to being around people. Wild ones are not as acclimated.
“They kill poisonous snakes. They make antivenom from opossums,” Gann said. “They can actually get bitten up to 30 times from a pit viper before anything would happen to them. They eat ticks and other insects. They are great to have in your yard, but I don’t recommend picking them up and trying to keep them. But if you just leave them alone, they’re good little friends to have in your yard.”
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