The Virginia opossum, North America’s only marsupial, appears in 501 Kentucky records spread across 91 counties, led by Fayette and Jefferson and touching Daniel Boone National Forest and Cumberland Gap National Historical Park along the way.
A pouch full of spring
The breeding year starts early, and it shows in the calendar. Counts climb through March and April, when females carry young in the pouch and, a few weeks later, travel with the litter clinging to their backs. An opossum has fifty teeth, more than any other North American land mammal, and it climbs with a thumb-like toe on each hind foot and a grasping, mostly naked tail.
A generalist that plays dead
Opossums eat nearly anything, from insects, fruit, and carrion to ticks gleaned in grooming, and they den wherever they find shelter, in hollow trees, brush piles, or burrows dug by other animals. Cornered, one may collapse into the famous involuntary faint that looks like death. Kentucky’s winters test them, since bare ears and tails take frostbite easily, yet they keep moving in every month of the year.
Status in Kentucky
NatureServe ranks the Virginia opossum S5, Secure, in Kentucky, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
