The Virginia opossum is a rare sight in Colorado. Open databases hold just 12 records for it, most of them iNaturalist sightings, and together they trace the leading edge of an animal that is still expanding into new country.
A marsupial at the frontier
The opossum is the only marsupial north of Mexico, a cat-sized night forager with a pale pointed face, a naked prehensile tail, and a pouch for its young. It was once a creature of the warm Southeast, but over the last century it has pushed north and west, following river corridors, farmland, and the food-rich edges of towns. Colorado’s records cluster on the eastern plains, along the Arkansas River valley and the South Platte drainage, and around Front Range cities, exactly the low, watered, cover-rich habitat the species rides into new territory.
Why it stays rare here
What caps the opossum’s advance is not food but cold. Its thinly furred ears and tail frostbite easily, and hard Colorado winters trim the leading edge of its range, which is why the state lists it as critically imperiled even though the species is globally secure and thriving elsewhere. The animal is nocturnal and has no fixed den, sheltering in culverts, woodpiles, brush, and borrowed burrows and drifting to a new spot every few nights, so it leaves few tracks in the observation record. Sightings here lean toward the colder months and the fringes of human settlement, where a wandering opossum is most likely to cross paths with a person or a trail camera.
Common questions
Are opossums native to Colorado? Yes. State and federal databases treat the opossum as native to its Colorado range rather than introduced, even though it only recently expanded onto the eastern plains and remains scarce and cold-limited at this edge of its range.
Full species profile
