The dogs started barking, the kind of bark that says something’s going on out here. I looked out onto the deck and saw our cat Jacques, waiting for someone to come along and let him in. As I’m explaining to the dogs it’s a false alarm, I see what they’ve been barking at. There, just a few feet past Jacques on the deck, was a possum.
Possum on deck
We’ve seen possums around from time to time since we moved here a few years ago. These are North American possums, not the same species as the Australian possums. We’re a little far north for them but they’ve been managing in Ontario for some years now, in spite of winters like this one. These animals are North Americas only marsupials!
27th Street 
Ya, it does look really rat-like in that photo. It’s a pretty slow-moving critter and it looks really peculiar when when it walks as if it was put together out of spare parts.
Possums are neat critters. We have a few up here 40 miles north of Toronto. We only rarely actually see them (about one every 5 years) but we quite often see their very distinctive tracks in the snow or a freshly raked garden bed. When a possum walks he places one foot directly in front of the other and each foot is placed precisely IN the track left by a previous step. This results in a track that looks as though some 2 legged critter did it because the row of prints forms a single line rather than the double line that is typical of 4 legged beasties. Tracks are distinctive enough that once you have identified them once you will be able to point and immediately say hey look possum tracks.
Possums have a special place in old time music. There are many many tunes that feature possums (maybe even more than ones which feature groundhogs). In general possums are supposed to be treed by dogs. Possums know this. So do dogs – even if they have never seen a possum before. It is what they do. Your dogs will be very disappointed in you if you didnt let them run that possum up a tree. The particular possum in your photo bears a striking resemblance to a New York sewer rat doesnt it?
Here are a couple of old tunes that sort of feature possums