They hang out in the trees and scream at one another as mating behavior, unless your convenient cop neighbor shoots them.
They nest in the woodpile next to your back door and threaten you with giant teeth if you try to sit on your stoop. (Personal experience.)
If you put pet food out, they congregate on your doorstep on your doorstep and fight over the food. (Personal observation.)
They stink. (Literally)
so they are the perfect leftist environmental correct solution to a wholly leftist disaster Lymes.
Lymes could have been knocked out early with DDT and judicious deer killing
Fruit trees? Opussums don’t really climb trees around here, unless something is after them.
Many years ago I was a wildlife rehabilitator, specializing in critters like skunks and raccoons, and often any other small mammal or bird that got injured. Loved the work, although getting skunk-sprayed at close range was pretty awful.
One night I saw a mother opossum who had been hit by a car, so I stopped to pull her off the road, and realized immediately:
1. She was dead.
2. She had a pouch full of baby possums.
The babies were the size of a peanut shell, hairless, blind, totally helpless. What to do?
I took them home, set them up in a tissue box, got an eyedropper and some warm milk, and tried raising them.
After a few weeks, and transfers to successively larger boxes, they looked and acted exactly like this:
I released them to the wild with a prayer.
Everything you wrote about them above is true. I would only add, it's the adults that act like that. The young'uns can be pretty cute. Teeth are sharp as hell, though. Ouch!
this is what my local wildlife specialists want to relocate to my land?
it is like the beaver pair they wanted to relocate, good bye yard trees. I said no no no.