The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

November 22, 2023

Windy and cold this morning—like North Dakota followed me home.  The gusts strip jaundiced leaves from the apple and chokecherry trees to layer the grass and pond with fallen color.  I could rake and skim but it doesn’t matter.  Instead, I release the chickens into the larger coop from their hutch where I’ve been locking them in at night.  Skunks on the rise.  They say if you want to see wildlife, try raising chickens.  But I never thought I’d see the Western Hemisphere’s only marsupial in the yard.

At midnight.

I flew out of bed with the screams.  Something was dragging one of the chickens around the coop, something dark and long-snouted and without the white plume of a skunk—more like a rat’s tail.  I ran back inside for a flashlight and my phone, threw open the coop door, and jumped inside when the animal refused to let go of the hen.  When it finally did, she ran to me and I tucked her under my arm and stuffed the flashlight in my mouth.  I wanted photos.  I’d never seen a live Mexican opossum.

Years ago, I asked Randy Babb, a biologist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department, whether opossums in Arizona were native or exotic.  He said he first thought they had escaped from people who kept them as pets, or that they were intentionally released.  Randy called one enthusiastic man from the late 1920s the “marsupial equivalent of Johnny Appleseed.”  Apparently, the guy was catching them in Arkansas and releasing them here all over the place.  As a result, most wildlife officials believed all Arizona opossums were introduced.

But after encountering the animals in northern Sonora, as well as in the mountains of southern Arizona, Randy began to suspect otherwise.  He started researching historical records and gathering information from road-killed and camera-trapped specimens.  “I could see that they exhibited classic Mexican faunal distribution—overlaying nearly perfectly with green rat snakes and trogons,” he said. 

He now thinks that, along with javelina and coatis, the Mexican opossum arrived in southern Arizona only recently on its own.

This one came on its own to my yard for the taste of chicken (the hen suffered only a few lost feathers).  The next night, I set the live trap for skunks as I have been lately, and in the morning there it was again, curled into a furry ball in the corner of the trap.  All tiny hands and naked tail.

We decided to keep this one, the Wife and I.  So, while she sliced apples for it and selected a beautiful Mexican blue oak for a home, I carried it to the new property.  One day we hope to see her again.  Maybe with a litter of young fresh from her pouch and clinging to her back.

There’s nothing like possum for Thanksgiving.

Because this is supposed to be about birds, here’s an Elegant Trogon in the yard from a few years ago--like the Mexican Opossum, making its way north into Arizona from Mexico.

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