(Mountain) Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Part 2 (opossums and bad cats.)

Opossums. Speaking of lao, Kevin always finds the interesting stuff happening around LA! He has a poem, yes, a poem, by Larry Levis, about an opossum trying to cross a busy Santa Monica street, poor thing. He found it in another blog, The Millennial Pedestrian.

The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.
By Larry Levis

At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum
Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street
Was brightly lit, the opossum would take
A few steps forward, then back away from the breath
Of moving traffic. People coming out of the bars
Would approach, as if to help it somehow.
It would lift its black lips & show them
The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors,
Teeth that went all the way back beyond
The flames of Troy & Carthage… (more at the link)

In my night walks this is the rarest animal. (The blog Skunks of Los Feliz got it right with their name! You cannot believe how common skunks are in Los Feliz and Silver Lake – everywhere, every night. Unfortunately, as I just noticed when I linked to it, this blog is now dead. C’est la vie.)

I read that opossums haven’t changed much, evolution-wise. Not very smart, but nicely wary. The first time I saw one I was really taken aback by their scaly tail and un-mammal looking face. Big, too.

I was upset to see that a car had hit one a year or so ago, and I stayed with it a bit, hoping I could see some sign of life. A few days later I was talking with a neighbor and he said he felt so bad because an animal had leaped out in front of him and he had no time to brake. He jumped out of the big SUV and looked and it was the opossum, and he felt so guilty, yet relieved that it wasn’t one of the feral cats (we have 2 or 3) in the neighborhood. I told him I would have much preferred it to be a stray cat. What do they contribute to the environment? Absolutely nothing, and they decimate the struggling wildbird population.