Saturday Suburban Wildlife Blogging

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We have been besieged lately by a possum who comes in through the cat door and hoovers up Domino’s cat food. This is Not Good. I tried and tried to trap him using cat food as bait, but he was too smart for that. He only wanted the food that was actually in Domino’s bowl. Then, a couple of days ago, I foolishly left a package of cookies on a coffee table that’s low enough to be possum accessible. When I woke up, it looked like a bomb had gone off in the living room. Cookie crumbs were everywhere.

Stupid possum. But a little while later I happened to be on the phone with my editor, Monika, who suggested that if the possum likes cookies, why not bait the trap with cookies? Good idea! So I bought more cookies, crumbled up a couple of them, and put them in the trap. No dice. So then my mother chimed in: the possum obviously doesn’t want crumbled-up cookies. He wants whole cookies that he can demolish himself. Fine. I put out a whole cookie.

And that was that. I finally trapped the possum. As you can imagine, he was not a happy possum during his brief imprisonment, but I drove him over to a local marsh and let him loose. It seems like pretty ideal possum territory, and it’s not too near any residential areas. Hopefully he’ll now spend a long and comfortable life in the company of his fellow critters.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

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