The Virginia opossum appears in 1,320 Georgia records spanning 117 counties, from Chattahoochee National Forest and the Blue Ridge Mountains down to Cumberland Island National Seashore and St. Simons Island. Fulton and DeKalb counties lead the list, but few mammals in this atlas show up across such a range of settings: swamp edges, farm country, and city neighborhoods alike.
North America’s only marsupial
An opossum raises its young in a pouch, where newborns no bigger than a bee finish their first weeks of life before graduating to riding on their mother’s back. Its other tools suit a life spent wandering at night: a gripping tail, an opposable toe on each hind foot for climbing, and one of the broadest diets of any Georgia mammal, taking fruit, insects, eggs, carrion, and anything edible left outside. Opossums do not dig their own dens, moving instead into hollow logs, brush piles, and abandoned burrows as they find them.
A spring surge, then a steady presence
Georgia reports build through late winter and peak in April, when females travel with young in the pouch and breeding activity puts more animals on the move. Sightings continue in every month. The state’s mild winters spare opossums the frozen ear and tail injuries their hairless extremities suffer farther north.
Status in Georgia
NatureServe ranks the Virginia opossum S5, Secure, in Georgia, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
