Virginia opossums turn up in 622 South Carolina records, from Charleston’s suburbs through Richland and Greenville to the bottomlands of Congaree National Park and the uplands of Sumter National Forest. Few mammals in the state range so evenly through wild and settled ground alike.
North America’s only marsupial
The opossum raises its young in a pouch, carries them on its back once they outgrow it, and climbs with a gripping tail and thumb-like hind toes, a set of traits no other North American mammal shares. It eats nearly anything, insects, fruit, eggs, carrion, pet food left outside, and it does not dig its own den, cycling instead through hollow logs, brush piles, and the abandoned burrows of other animals. When bluffing fails, it may collapse into the famous death-feigning trance, an involuntary state it cannot simply snap out of.
Night shift, all year
Opossums stay active through every season, and South Carolina’s mild winters spare them the frostbitten ears and tails that mark opossums farther north. Reports peak in April, when females travel with pouch young or a litter riding their backs and move more by necessity than by choice. Most encounters still come the way people have always met this animal, crossing a beam of headlights or shuffling along a fence line after dark.
Status in South Carolina
NatureServe ranks the Virginia opossum S5, Secure, in South Carolina, and the species is native across the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
