Tropical Possum Night

Originally uploaded by evilgenius.

We heard scritching in the attic a few days ago, and I went up with a flashlight and saw a possum in the corner. We got a cage trap, and baited it with tuna. Tonight I saw that it had been tripped and that some of the tuna was gone. Because of the way it was closed, I figured that the little possum might have been able to squeeze out. I redid the closing back brackets a different way and reset it.

About an hour later, we heard a big bang from the attic. I checked, and sure enough we had trapped the little booger. We drove him down by the river and let him go in the woods. At least we tried to. It took several minutes from the point the cage was opened to get the thing to actually leave. Finally it did go and went tearing off.

We went home and just for good measure reset the trap. I didn't really expect to catch anything else. Five minutes later, we caught another one! We took it back to the same spot and let it go. Even now we can hear another one up there, so this might be a long night of shuttling possums back and forth to the woods.

Update: PS - it wasn't until I got home and looked at this photo that I realized I let the possum go right in a patch of poison ivy. I'm lucky I didn't get any on me.