Last night was my first night setting any traps this year. With fur prices in the toilet and most of what I typically catch not being worth the time to skin, it seemed pointless to do much trapping, even though I love doing it. A friend of mine teaches biology at a local college and when we were last at her house for supper, I met a friend of hers, who is also a biology professor, who is doing a study on the parasites in opossums. He previously did a similar study on bobcats. He was having a hard time getting many opossums for the study, so I volunteered to help.

So for the the first time ever, I find myself targeting opossums. I have an egg dump for eggs that don't hatch during incubation, that draws plenty of opossums, plus fox, coyotes, skunks and raccoons. Yesterday I set my 7 remaining box traps, because our farm cats eat the eggs too, just off of the trails leading to the dump. The dump was still covered with a few hundred, scattered quail eggs, that did not hatch in last weeks hatch, so I figured I might not catch much, even with the night time temperature finally staying above freezing. Today there were no remaining eggs on the pile. The first 4 traps, which were closest to the pile, were empty. The 5th trap had all the bait missing and the trap door was lowered to the latch, which usually results from a large raccoon holding the door open with it's back, eating and then backing out. The last two each held opossums.




If anyone else in Ohio is interested in donating opossums to the study, please pm me and I'll give you the contact information for the biologist.

Keith

Nice looking double!