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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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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