Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Rural Living got an opossum around - need some information

Got a few questions for you folks.

We just had a possum in my compost pile here in east central MN. I have never had one around before now.

Do they cause any particular problems in a garden?

The critter is kind of interesting to watch and seems pretty tame. I need to know if I should exterminate him/her, or not bother with it.

If you have chickens, possums are a problem. Otherwise, they are harmless.

No chickens here TNrifleman. I do bury a lot of fish remains in my garden beds, and wonder if they will get in there and dig everything up.

They have the best nose in the woods.

I hear thems good eatin!

They hibernate so if they are out in the snow they are sick.

They get "snow blind" - if I see them in the cold I put them down.

I heard they are eaten by some folks and looked into recipes out of curiosity. Personally I don't think I will be trying it in the near future, but the people I watched on youtube made it look pretty good.

We hit 40f yesterday afternoon which may have brought it out at dusk. Our snow has yielded to some patches of bare ground showing in places.

After eating in our compost pile of kitchen scraps, he/she climbed the fence and went under our deck.

I read that they can get into tomatoes and do a lot of damage, so on that basis alone, plus the fact that it might be sick, and I don't want a litter of 6-10 setting up shop in the immediate neighborhood, I am leaning heavily toward extermination with .22 and/or live trap.

Grinners are the undead form of dead raccoons.

They are zombies, and must be dealt with accordingly.



Not sure about his hibernate theory.

I see them year round, even when the temps are "cold" which is defined as 10-30 here.

They have a great immune system, augmented by their lower than normal body temp (normal meaning its lower than most viruses and such can thrive in) making them resistant to a lot of disease effects - but they can be carriers.

They can and will eat anything that remotely can be considered food (especially pet food left outside), and while they lack the problem solving skills of coons, they make up for it in that they are stupidly stubborn.

I had one eat the venturi pipes off my gas grill because it smelled like food.

They all must die...

Possums don't hibernate. See them year round in my area.

Huh, I'm from upstate New York and I never saw one after it snowed.

Interesting.

They was possumin'

It was Michigan winter when I encountered the gut pile grinner that forever changed my life....

wouldn't be any different than a raccoon in my field...

17M2...wap..........

Caught two in the live trap this weekend they keep showing up eating the leftover cat food, tookem off to a swamp about 5 miles away and spray painted their tail and backside with orange paint . Waiting to see if they come back!!

All my possum paint is lead based...

I'm sure glad you found this thread!

I started to give you a head's up so you could share your wisdom, but then I figured if anyone here could sniff out a possum thread, it would be you!

Lord I hate those nasty bastards...

looks like my daughter's cat

attended a coon hunters bash for the dog races (water trough w/ coon swimming ahead--you had to be there...)

the fare included possum and coon and personally speaking, I think both make better garden fertilizer.

Wish I hadn't been right in the middle of lunch when I read that...I seem to have lost my appetite.

Sorry man. To balance things, the cookies, cakes and other snacks were really good.

But I couldn't help wondering at the time where the cooking lard was rendered from...:)

Mmmmm...Coon..

And.......

You can have my share Charlie!

Funny thing happened on morning when I was in high school.

Me and a buddy were skinning coons and possums and a few ringtails from the night before's hunt, when a pickup stopped and backed up.

Old black feller got out and asked what we would take for the carcasses. I asked what he wanted them for, and he said to eat..

Told him he was welcome to them. He loaded them all up on an feed sack we gave him for the back floorboard of his car.

He took em all. Coons, possums and ringtails.

i've had my best luck with a #160 conibear
and a 5 gallon paint bucket with the appropriate
sized square hole cut in the lid and used as
kind of a cubby set using old baloney for bait.
best was 13 in 13 nights in a row.
one of the neighbors keeps cat food out 24/7
and attracts all kinds of vermin, but won't
cease putting it out. her house stays ridden
with fleas and she has an exterminator out
at least once a month. still, after all that
s*** she won't quit putting the cat food out.
i should add i've caught some monster nyc-sized
rats at times. regular rat trap w/ peanut butter
and a piece of mechanics wire through a hole
drilled in the corner keeps them from running off

fwiw, i've seen old dead cow carcasses out at
the back fence corner that possums had set up
housekeeping inside of, and were eating the
innards out. you could get up close and kick
the cow and hear the growling GGGRRRRRRRR! ! !

Damn Son's and some of there blackguard running compadres stuck a live grinner in the newspaper machine in front of the local cafe early one Sunday morning. Parked across street to watch the action. Damn Scofflaws! That was almost 20 years ago.

Yeah I heard all about it after the fact.

That's brilliant.

You should have given em each a beer and a cigarette.

And a good stern talking to of course.

And......

Are you telling me you never heard this before?

They are out year around here in Michigan! and they will bite!

I don't know how nomadic these critters are, but he/she did not show up since I dumped a new 5 gallon pail of kitchen scraps in the compost pile yesterday.

I have the CZ ready by the patio door, but no opportunity for a shot yet.

It has cooled off again so maybe it holed up somewhere.

The story I heard long ago was...........

There was a cattle farmer who had an old sick cow. One day he noticed she wasn't with the rest of the heard. So he went to look for her. Of course she was dead. As he walked up to her, he noticed her belly moving, so he kicked it. All of a sudden a family of grinners ran out of it's azzhole.

That'll be good for an RWE nightmare or two!

It will be new to me, and sounds interesting. I also hate "grinnin' fools", but suspect you have good reason.

It's illegal to transport and release them.
If you're going to trap them go ahead and kill them.

You're just making them someone else's problem.

Possums are natures scavengers, and like buzzards eat up the dead stuff. I suppose that should make them good animals, but they also are one of the biggest enemies of nesting wild turkeys, and that's why I hate them. I kill every one I get a chance to, especially if they're close to the house and barns. They will kill chickens, and make a mess out of outside feeders. I keep live traps set most of the year, and catch a number of them that way. I do NOT release them back into the wild.

I've never seen one turn down a mango.Eat the mango,save the peeling and seed for your trap.

Can't use a gun or even a bow here in-city.
I was taking the trash out to the dumpster in a college neighborhood, and had a quarterstaff in my other hand for two legged problems. It was a bit of a suprises when i lifted the lid and 5 coons attacked me. Big ones. I killed 4 of the 5, while my girlfriend at the time (later my wife) ran and grabbed a big flashlight to see what all the noise was about.
It was touch and go there for a while, and i broke that quarterstaff. (Hickory). I've run into a few grinners as well, and had to help out a neighbor when her dogs cornered one in the yard. They were making a hell of a racket and would not come back inside. Used a tamper handle on that one,
Can't release them if you catch 'em, it just gives someone else a problem. (And they are carriers for lots of nasties)
Edit: note, it was the fleas carried by rodents that caused plague to sweep through Europe and kill a third of all people living there.. ...whack 'em.

Well, here goes. Cue the violin music....

It was during the Michigan Firearm season, and I had just capped a nanny using a 240gr hydrashok from my Smith.



I set to dressing the ole hag, and as I started with my trusty Buck 110, I remembered the Schrade my wife got me the year before with a gut hook.

So I used the Schrade and left the doe's innards in a pile of steaming stench.

Drug her out of the woods to my trusty deer hauling chevy S-10



(Not the actual deer in the story, but its a cool pic. Big f'n deer, eh?)

That night, while enjoying a Black Russian (my fave), I realized I must have set my Buck knife down when I switched knives, and resigned myself to returning to the scene of the carnage and retrieving the old warrior.

Overnight, a couple inches of snow blanketed the woods.

That morning, I made my way towards the pile, shouldering my 870 slugger, just in case.

As I approached the heap of snow covered innards I noticed it pulsating irregularly, to wit I approached cautiously and gave it a tap with the lead chunker.

It what can be best described as a mix between the alien gut scene and the walking dead, a hideous toothy grinning zombie emerged from the pile, blood covered, wreaking of bowel and stomach contents, hissing, and in general, possessing both a poor disposition as well as one of Satan's incarnate minions.

It certainly did not want me searching the area for my Buck knife.



I determined that the darkwood of Michigan was no place for the two of us to coexist, especially since my knife lay somewhere nearby.

So I slugged him with a 12 gauge exorcisor. (new word - just made it up).

Whilst I did recover the blade, the mere site of a grinner sends me into near fits of demonic dread, of Catholic proportions.

They are evil.

They are the evil dead....


I hate those nasty bastards..

Why is it when the subject of 'possums and RWE come up I get a mental image of this:

That's the best hunting story I've heard in a while.

The hell with possums, somebody needs to shoot that damn whistle pig up there in Punxsutawney, PA. The bastrd is calling for 6 more weeks of winter.

Well, I don't know that a guy can have too much fun imbibing at deer camp but you must have been approaching it...:)

They clean things up and provide sport for the dog so I let them be. Sometimes the dog can get two or three crunch sessions out of them if they play dead fast enough...appears he doesn't like the taste either. The younger dog however, is merciless. I found three dead ones cutting wood last week.They are about as quick as an earthworm...amazing they survive at all.

When the kids were very little I put a pair of gloves to grab and shake one when convenient at the bird feeder and then pose him in his "dead" state for my wife to point out to the kids through the window--like sitting with a coffee cup stuff (my wife's coffeecup, not mine).

The little ones don't seem to do the play dead thing and get toothy.

I think I've tried eatin about everything we grow down here in the south, but I draw the line on possum...

I've been told by Dad (they had to eat them during the depression), that you have to pen them and feed them out, or as he put it 'clean them out'.

I might would have tried them at one time, but when you drive up on a dead cow, and see a possum or two 'run out from inside the carcass that's been laying there for a week', that's where I draw the line.

I've been hungry, but not that hungry!

Be like eating a buzzard with hair and a pouch...

I lived about 20 minutes from the hunt area.

So technically, I wasn't at deer camp. I was nestled in my LazyBoy, probably watching Veteran's Day movies I recorded on the VCR...

Deer camp ain't what it used to be, I suppose.

Now that we are down to two of us, a lot of the same creature comforts have appeared...shameful but much appreciated...:) The 78 jeep stands out as the vestige POS on the equipment list.

Interestingly, have never seen a possum there during season that I remember and we don't have have a barmaid, either, due to the estrogen restrictions on the camp after October 1st.

My dad and granddad used to possum hunt with hounds back during the Great Depression. They would catch them live, and sell them to the local Blacks. My daddy said he'd caught too many in dead horses and cows to ever want to eat one himself. I agree.

Trapping my place, I have to clear out possums to get to
the cool stuff. Possums = Buzzard food.

That's what I do with them too!

Those buzzards turn 'em inside out in a few hours too!... Just like a sock. With bones!

Nasty