The more I learn the clearer it becomes that I am quite ignorant. I was reminded of this after our last Trafalgar Country Gardeners meeting when Kathy, the very knowledgeable speaker from Utopia Wildlife Rehabilitators in Hope, Indiana, made her presentation.
It was a useful hour, and enabled me to stay true to my motto which is: Learn something new everyday. I figure it is a handy strategy to keep my ignorance at bay. I learned new things about hawks, owls and crows—animals I thought I already knew. I was especially intrigued by Maggie May, the opossum they brought. The things I didn’t — and still don’t — know about opossums could fill a book. Utopia Wildlife’s mission is to rehabilitate injured wild animals and then released them back into nature, but Maggie May doesn’t have a tail (It was bitten off by a dog.) and wouldn’t survive in the wild on her own, so she resides at Utopia.
If Maggie May were in the wild I would be glad to welcome her to my property. She would be a useful creature to have around. I say this because ticks and the Lyme disease they sometimes carry are an opossum food source. It is estimated that a single opossum can eat up to 5,000 ticks in a season. Also, because of their low body temperature and efficient immune system opossums very rarely carry rabies.
So, except for the occasional raid on a chicken coop or a tomato patch, Maggie May wouldn’t really be a pest animal. She wouldn’t live under or seek out human structures but would choose the hollow of an old tree to live and raise her young. She would be solitary, nocturnal and usually slow-moving. And although she can hiss and growl and bare her sharp teeth (Opossums have 50 teeth, the most of any North American mammal), she would much prefer to avoid anything that might appear threatening. Opossums are the only marsupials that inhabit North America. This along with those 50 teeth make opossums quite special in the North American animal world.
As a English teacher and word nerd, a question occurred to me that I didn’t ask during the presentation: Why do we sometimes say “opossum” and other times “possum?” Is it a regional thing? Something one would hear in the Midwest or South but not in New England? I didn’t think so, but I needed to find out.
Well, first of all, let’s deal with the actual name for Maggie May and her kind. The scientific name is Didelphidae, and the first written reference to the creature (“Apposouns”) was in 1610. John Smith of the Jamestown Colony gets credit for making the English word taking it from the Virginia Algonquin words for “white” and “dog, small animal.” He called it the “Virginia Opossum” and the entire name is still sometimes used.
As for the word “possum,” in Australia there lives another species of small marsupials known as “possums” without the “O” in front. This animal was named by another Englishman, Sir Joseph Banks who accompanied the English explorer Captain James Cook. The Australian animal reminded Banks of “An animal of the Opossum tribe.” The possum is of a different scientific order “Phalangeridae” and although they are both marsupials, the similarities otherwise are few.
In North America “opossum” and “possum” are used interchangeably and according to one usage manual, “possum” is used more than twice as often as “opossum” in both speech and print. So much for my regional usage theory.
At the presentation I learned opossums don’t hang by their tails and aren’t consciously pretending when they “play possum.” They are in fact in an involuntary state of shock. These are all good things to know about both opossums and possums. Today I feel a little less ignorant.
