An unusual opening beneath a home led a Dallas homeowner to set up a night-vision camera and discover the space was home to a mother opossum and her 10 babies.
Here's what to know
Ian Smith regularly watches the wildlife around his Texas garden, so the hole under his home stood out right away as something unusual.
"That's too big to be a rat," he said in an Instagram video.
Rather than keep guessing, he put a night-vision camera near the opening to see what was visiting after dark. The mystery was solved when the footage showed a female opossum heading for the hole with at least 10 tiny babies clinging to her.
"I was thrilled. I replayed the footage 100 times," Smith said, per TAG24.
Seeing the full group together surprised him most. Smith said he had "never seen a healthy family that large in real life," adding, "I expected to see an opossum. But not 80 opossums. Mama's got the team on her back."
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More background
After recognizing that the space was serving as a refuge for the animals, Smith chose not to push them out.
"No, I'm not going to evict a single mother with 57 babies. Opossums are not rodents. In fact, they tend to keep rats away and they eat roaches. So as far as I'm concerned live and let live," Smith said in his Instagram video while literally throwing down a welcome mat.
TAG24 reported that the family eventually left without any intervention. A couple of the juveniles still showed up in the garden, and Smith named one of them Pinky.
Before taking any action, Smith focused on identifying the animal involved. Once he determined it was an opossum family, he made a decision based on his knowledge of their typical behavior.
"They are generally nomadic animals, so they often hunker down in a safe place to raise babies; then when the babies are old enough, they go on another adventure," he said.
Where can I learn more?
Similarly, homeowners often discover wildlife in the tucked-away parts of a yard or house. Here are some more opossum stories.
• At another home, an opossum named Poe kept returning beneath the deck for snacks and water.
• A homeowner lifting the lid found a trapped mother opossum nursing babies inside a trash can.
• In one garden, cameras captured an opossum hauling nesting material with surprising determination.
• In a backyard encounter, a fearless opossum wandered past a cat and stirred pregnancy speculation.
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