New Hampshire sits near the cold edge of the Virginia opossum’s range, and the state’s 247 records show it. Rockingham County and the mild Seacoast lead by a wide margin, while the North Country barely registers. This is a southern animal making its living at the northern limit of what it can endure.
A marsupial far from the tropics
The opossum is North America’s only marsupial, raising tiny young in a pouch and later carrying them on its back, and its bare ears and scaly, nearly hairless tail pay for New Hampshire winters in frostbite. It persists here by being unspecialized, an omnivore taking carrion, insects, fruit, eggs, and spilled pet food, denning in woodpiles, culverts, sheds, and hollow logs across the farm-and-suburb mosaic around Great Bay and the southern counties.
Warm-month wanderers
Reports come in every month but crest in June, when females carry pouch young and all ages forage through the mild nights. Winter sightings often arrive as tracks in fresh snow, since an opossum abroad in a January cold snap is working against its own thin-furred physiology.
Status in New Hampshire
NatureServe ranks the Virginia opossum S5, Secure, in New Hampshire, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
