I love animals. When I began this blog I had hoped to learn about the native animals of Indiana and I hoped to take some pictures of my experiences with native animals; well, now I have a chance to do just that. For the past several nights a opossum has been getting into my raised bed garden. I have been finding tomatoes that were half eaten, and since I knew it wasn't my neighbor's cat, Clyde, it had to be something else. I thought maybe a raccoon, but two nights ago I saw the opossum! I ran out with my camera, but was unable to capture the critter on film. Undaunted, I took a bunch of corn cobs and set them back by the fence, and again, last night, the little guy, or gal, was spotted slinking across the yard. Yesterday morning the corn cobs were turned into a fine powder. Still, no pictures though. Okay- I have to get pictures of this guy! The plan tonight is to take the vegetable scraps from the soup my wife and daughter made today and set a sort of trap for him; not a real trap as I only want some pictures!
Next week my neighbor is going to bring his live trap over so we can peacefully relocate the animal to the woods. I am going to photograph this whole adventure and will post the pictures later. But for now I have some questions that need answering about this fascinating little animal, which is native to Indiana and can be seen most everywhere across the state. For now I am off to the library to get some books. I want to know what opossums consider a proper diet. I also want to know more about their general behavior. Do they sleep mostly during the day? When is their breeding season? Where do they live?
I will post the answers to these questions soon and I will note the resources I used to answer said questions.
Stay Wild,
Steve Skirvin
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Steve,
ReplyDeleteThis is not really what you're asking at all, but a friend of mine told me that he read about a tactic for convincing birds to avoid your tomatoes: hang red Christmas tree ornaments from your vines and when birds are rebuffed from the shiny glass, they will learn to avoid your plants. It apparently didn't work for him, but who knows?
-JAK
Okay- I want to go through some of these older posts to follow my thinking and compare some of the events, mostly concerning our opossum friend, Sparky, to what I am learning concerning Inquiry models. In this particular post I was Wondering, which is one of the 8 w's I will try to work through- more on this later. But by 'Wondering' I mean the process of forming meaningful questions, which come naturally to use when we consider a particular idea/subject/object, etc. At this point in my blog journey I was wondering and asking questions about opossums in Indiana. So, I wanted to know all about them- what do they eat? Where do they live? What are they really, besides little furry animals that came out at night. Here is a relevant qoute from Daniel Callison in his book entitled The Blue Book- "The human ability to ask meaningful questions sets us apart from as creatures who wonder, doubt, devise, revise, challenge, and eventually change our enviroment to meet our needs." I asked questions and formulated a way to acquire information and perhaps use the information to catch our opossum and learn even more.
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