Vermont sits near the top of the Virginia opossum’s range, and its 465 records show it: they concentrate in the mild lowlands, led by Chittenden, Addison, and Windsor counties, through the Champlain Valley and the lower Connecticut River towns rather than the cold Northeast Kingdom.
North America’s only marsupial, at its limit
An opossum raises its young in a pouch, carries them on its back, and climbs with a gripping tail and a thumb-like hind toe, equipment evolved far to the south. It has spread steadily northward over the past century, but a Vermont winter is still hard on it. Bare ears and a naked tail take frostbite, and an animal with little stored fat must keep foraging through the coldest weeks. Records from Green Mountain National Forest, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, and the Little Otter Creek wetlands mark the wooded, watery edges it favors.
Late winter is the busy season
Opossums do not hibernate, and Vermont’s reports actually crest in February and March, the start of breeding, when males range widely at night and hungry animals turn up along roads and at the edge of yards. Summer counts stay comparatively quiet, the season when a mother is carrying her litter and keeping to cover.
Status in Vermont
NatureServe ranks the Virginia opossum S5, Secure, in Vermont, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
