The Virginia opossum appears in 157 Rhode Island records, with Washington County carrying nearly half and Providence County most of the rest. The species is near the northern limit of its range here, yet it turns up across the state, from the wooded parcels of the Decoppet Estate and Black Farm Management Area to the river corridors and land-trust properties threading through settled towns.
North America’s only marsupial, at its cold edge
An opossum raises its young in a pouch, and by late spring the joeys ride on their mother’s back as she forages. She eats almost anything, insects, carrion, fruit, eggs, small rodents, and the ticks she grooms from her own coat, which lets her live wherever woodland edge meets quiet ground cover. The tradeoff is that opossums have thin fur and bare ears and tails that suffer in hard freezes, and Rhode Island winters are about as harsh as the species tolerates. Animals here often show ears notched and scarred by frostbite, a mark of a life lived at the edge of the map.
Night walkers with a spring surge
Records peak in April and May, when females carrying young travel widely and the year’s first litters begin moving with them. The rest of the year they work the dark hours steadily, denning in hollow logs and brush piles when cold weather pins them down for days at a stretch. A cornered opossum may bare its teeth or slump into the famous faint, but both are bluff, and given room it moves on.
Status in Rhode Island
NatureServe ranks the Virginia opossum S5, Secure, in Rhode Island, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
