A Winter's Tail

These are fairly desperate times for the backyard animal kingdom. The entire landscape is a sea of white, the official snow depth is about 5 inches, but from what I can see back there, it’s more like 8 to 10. Nothing but a bright and smooth and sculpted bleakness. Pretty to look at from the kitchen window, but not so great if one must live in it.


The birds flock often around the feeders, the chicadees flitting to and from, picking up seeds and carrying them up into the cherry tree; the juncos show up, hopping among the fallen seeds, looking like a cross between tiny penguins and little chickens. Our resident cardinal couple makes frequent appearances, one first, then the other dropping in; they don’t hesitate to push the other birds out of the way. The finches show up from time to time, work their way into the food line, all of them depending on me to take the time to shovel a path to the feeders and shake the snow off. Which I gladly do, both out of a sense of obligation and also out of a selfish desire to watch them all go about their lives.


I’ve mentioned the rabbits out there, especially the one with the broken hind foot (not a lucky rabbit’s foot by any measure). My damaged friend hangs out close to the house and looks eagerly toward the door whenever I open it, or when I turn on the back light to see what’s up out there late at night; the other rabbits bound for safety, but my friend -- I call her Flatfoot, which means whenever I see her I think of the Beatles’ song “Come Together,” with its line, “Here come old Flattop [read Flatfoot] come groovin’ up slowly.” But I digress. The point is that food is scarce for the rabbits, too. And for the squirrels who periodically raid the platform feeder for sunflower seeds, which they vacuum up relentlessly.


So relentless and desperate are the squirrels that they made me pay for storing those sunflower seeds inside the screened porch. I’d see them from time to time hanging from the sides, looking for a way in, and I know how easily they pick up the scent of food, but I foolishly presumed the newly-mended screens would keep them out. Hah. Today I found the snow on the back porch pocked with little footprints, and the sunflower seed container tipped over and emptied. I traced the footprints back to a corner where I found a perfectly circular hole chewed through the screen, with tufts of squrrel fur on the loose ends.


Damn them. But I put the temptation there, and Old Man Winter has been so harsh this year. I’ll take remedial measures in the spring, if it ever arrives. In the interim, I’ll keep all the seeds in sealed containers in the garage, and hope the squirrels lose interest.


One more winter appearance of note today. I glanced out the window this afternoon and saw what looked like a very big rat with a sinisterly stupid grin on its face. I knew right away what it was -- a good old-fashioned American oppossum. North America’s only marsupial mammal, with an appearance only its mother could love. Kind of dirty-gray in color, the size and phsique of a very fat housecat, with a long fur-less tale, a pink nose festooned with long whiskers, sharp-looking teeth, and pink feet that have an eerie resemblance to human hands. If you should startle one, say when it’s rummaging through your trash-can, it will give off a sort of breathy weak growl and either shuffle off or, if it feels trapped, may fall over in a dead faint until you leave.


Possums, as they are colloquially called, are omnivorous and eat everything from garbage to garden snakes, insects, fruit, and so on in the summer; but in the winter, especially a winter like this, they don’t find much. Which means that sometimes they even give up their nocturnal ways and come out in the daylight to forage; this one was eating some of the spilled sunflower seeds near the feeders. I wanted to see if he’d faint, but as soon as I opened the door he lumbered off under the wooden porch, no doubt creating quite a stir for any of my rabbit friends who would likely have been hiding out in there. He seems to be be long gone, now.


But his brief visit stirred up a bittersweet memory. As I said, possums are marsupial, so the young are raised first in the mother’s pouch, just like a kangaroo joey. When they get too big for the pouch, the members of the brood (which could be as many as a dozen) will ride around on the mother’s back until they are too old to nurse, at which point they disperse.


And, finally, to the memory. When I was in high school many moons ago, I spent one summer working (volunteering actually) at a local nature preserve. I did various chores, ranging from cleaning out cages to manning the information counter to giving canned talks on the local ecosystem. In those days the preserve was a shoestring operation out in the boondocks, and in order to save money on food for the carnivores on display (a few coyotes and foxes) staff would pick up any roadkill they came across, throw it in the back of the jeep, and bring it back for our furry friends.


One day they came across a dead possum, but when they picked it up they noticed it had been a mother and had two young possums still alive, just old enough to maybe be nursed to maturity. I volunteered to take them home. For the next few weeks my family and I kept them in a cardboard box, and fed them formula from a tiny bottle. They were immensely cute as they held onto the bottle with those little pink hands, and they seemed to grow attached to us. At least they were totally at ease when we handled them, and clung to our clothes as we walked around the house.


When the time came for our family’s scheduled vacation, the preserve’s staff naturalist offered to watch the possums -- named Suzy and Sammy -- for the week we’d be gone. But when we go back, the naturalist told us that they had died. His story was that he had kept them in a cage in the garage and the engine fumes were too harsh for their little lungs. Perhaps. But I also knew that the naturalist was an ardent snake-owner, and I’ve always suspected he fed them to his snakes. Maybe, maybe not. But in any event they were gone.


And I miss them to this day. I said earlier that possums have an appearance only a mother could love, but I think that’s too limited. Baby mammals always have redeeming features; Suzy and Sammy certainly did. So when I see a possum in the wild, as I did today, I don’t see the overgrown garbage-rat most people see; I see those bright-eyed little ones eagerly holding those bottles, and trusting us as freely as any sentient being can trust another.


To have known them that way, for that brief period of time, was a wonder I never expected to know. And a timeless one at that. And that, my friends, is today’s winter’s tail.