North Carolina’s 2,790 Virginia opossum records cover 96 of the state’s 100 counties, from the mountain coves of Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests to the wet woods of Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge on the Coastal Plain. North America’s only marsupial is plainly at home everywhere in the state.
A marsupial that carries its nursery
A female opossum raises her young in a fur-lined pouch, and once they outgrow it, the babies ride along on her back while she forages. April brings the year’s strongest counts, when spring litters have left the pouch and a single sighting can mean a mother carrying a half-dozen riders. Opossums climb with a gripping, prehensile tail and a thumb-like hind toe, and they work almost entirely at night.
Shelter without digging
Opossums never dig a den of their own. They move among hollow logs, brush piles, culverts, and burrows abandoned by other animals, which lets them settle as easily in a Wake County backyard as in the refuge thickets of Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge or the Green Swamp Preserve. A broad, opportunistic diet of insects, fallen fruit, eggs, carrion, and ticks fits them to nearly every kind of cover the state offers, from the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Outer Banks.
Status in North Carolina
NatureServe ranks the Virginia opossum S5, Secure, in North Carolina, and the species is native across the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous.
Full species profile
