We have relocated them in a similar way to Carol if they get pesky. Usually I just let a dog out to chase one away and that keeps our yard possum-free for weeks. We have had years when we have huge numbers of skunks, possums and coons. This year is not one of those years, but it most likely is because we have lots of coyotes. We do not feed dogs or cats outdoors at all because their food draws too many varmints and too many of those varmints carry distemper and/or rabies and/or other stuff. I suppose that as long as you had your dog, it chased off the varmints that might come looking for a free meal from the cat dish? The chickens chased off the only armadillo that has shown up this year. Earlier in the year we had lots of bunnies. I believe the coyotes have just about wiped out the bunnies, which is fairly typical. All in all, except for the coyotes, it is a quiet varmint year here, but that's probably because the coyotes are doing their own form of meat relocation.

Ty was our awesome watchdog (also a skilled esape art, climbing our chain link fence to follow me on walks or just looking for a gate to open at the right time.) More than one gruesome ending for some poor, hapless bunny, vole, and one time, a woodpecker. (He was fast! His established path along the fenceline by the road was a testament to him racing passing cars, often winning.)

Ty liked being outside at night because it was cooler and he wasn't a constant barker (like our cowdog, Betty.) The perfect night watch.

Two of our cats are fed outside because one is on a special diet and the dry cat food makes her sick. I've been doing better about bringing the food bowls in at night, but that pesky possum was knocking over the sealed dog & cat food containers and managing to open the lids. So, it's trapping time again!

I'm sorry you lost Ty, and it sounds like he was a wonderful companion. I know how hard it is to lose a beloved pet. We lost our lab/Rottweiler mix, Duke, earlier this year too. He was 12 years old and looked big and fierce (and could be, if needed) but really was just a big old teddy bear. We still have his brother, Jet, who always has been really laid back but has become fiercely protective of me since Duke died. I guess Jet was just coasting along all these years letting Duke keep an eye on everything and everyone, but then he stepped up and took over the job once Duke was gone.

I have to keep a tight rein on our dogs as the coyotes will pick fights with them and nip the flesh off their hips if they get the chance. It is a horrible thing to hear your own dog in a fight with a coyote or coyotes, and I guess it has been about 3 years since a couple of our dogs ran off into the woods pursuing coyotes and got into a fight with them. I got the dogs back before they got themselves into too much trouble. That day I was terrified we'd lose them both and so grateful we didn't.

It is amazing how smart hungry wildlife can be. When we first moved here, raccoons would come get up on the porch and climb up onto the outdoor furniture and look in the windows. When they saw us, they'd knock on the windows begging for food. (We never, ever fed them on purpose, though they'd get in the cat food if there was any on the porch, and we stopped feeding the cats outdoors when we realized how much it attracted wildlife/) Coons are violent killers of poultry and we don't tolerate them being around here. They've killed too many of our chickens and guineas over the years for them to ever be welcome here. We chase them off and if they keep coming back, then they must be dealt with. I don't mind possums too much as they are one of the few varmints that will kill and eat venomous snakes, but they also raid the compost pile and devour garden veggies if they manage to circumvent the fence. So, we try to discourage them from hanging around when we see them.

We had a dog named Sam who kept us mostly varmint free for a long time. If you opened the door when he went to it and whined (he always knew when something was out there), he'd run grab the varmint by the neck, shake it once or twice, and drop the dead varmint to the ground. Then he'd come right back indoors. He was a great dog and none of our other dogs ever have been as efficient at dealing with varmints as he was.

We had a rough few years here when a nearby rancher had almost all the trees and underbrush bulldozed after he bought the place. I don't blame him---he needed for his ranchland to be grassy grazing land, and too much was reverting to woodland before he bought that place. All the wildlife that had been living on his large piece of property seemed to flee to our much smaller piece of property and to our acres of woodland, which then became overpopulated. We had every kind of varmint you can imagine in huge numbers. It was an awful few years, but we are back down to more normal levels now.

Dawn

A possum got into my melon patch and sampled 2 of my nearly ripe melons over the weekend. I pulled the nibbled melons and thru them along the edge of the woods and then put individual 18" diameter cages around the remaining melons in the patch and covered all of the cages with fencing weighed down by rocks. Hopefully that will protect the rest as a few more were quickly turning.

We feed the possums, raccoons and other critters every nite on our back deck with leftovers and secondary cat food. Used to always see a skunk eating alongside a possum. Entertains our inside cats and keeps me from picking their bodies off the street in front. However, since our farm is 45 minutes away, worries about critters and crops mostly pertain to deer.

I am not certain where all the possums come from around here, but they are many as evidence of my dog's pest control reveals. I rewarded her once and there has been no stopping her. Warned the old man about letting his chihuahua's get loose. He's feeble and slow, but still hasn't figured out what dog leashes are.

Possums groom themselves like cats. They remove and swallow the ticks they find, preventing completion of the ticks life cycle. It is postulated they consume 5000 ticks in a season (not in a week, as some memes suggest.) But those TEETH. They look scary and I don't think I'd want them around. Ducks eat ticks, too, and they're cute. ;)

I put out cracked corn for the doves and deer, and other varmints eat it. I don't mind. We don't necessarily have a lot of mixed herds of animals eating and drinking together, except in drought. In drought periods, you can look out the window and sometimes see coons, deer, rabbits, squirrels, armadillos, possums and deer all gathered around the food or water together. The garden is fenced, so by feeding them something, I don't feel quite so badly about excluding them from the garden during weather-related hard times.

One of our neighbors had a very small dog (he reminded me a bit of a rat terrier but he probably was a mix of several kinds) that lived to a very old age. I think a coyote or something finally got him because he just disappeared one day while out on patrol. He was a great dog, but wasn't really big enough to deal with the varmints. However, he could catch, kill, skin and eat copperheads and rattlesnakes, so he was worth his weight in gold.

We have had a lot of possums around this year for some reason and I almost hit a raccoon tonight on my way home from Grove. It is so dark out tonight, probably the darkest night I have ever seen.

Daryl asked me this morning if I had found a recipe for possum stew, so I knew we had trapped the second possum. No way I would cook and/or eat a possum, lol. He or she has gone to the creek to rejoin its relative/mate.

Amy, I wonder if those possums are responsible for the small tick population we experienced this year? We started out early this year discovering them on us when we were out gardening and attributed it to the mild winter we had and dreading an explosion as it warmed up. They just seemed to disappear. I hope I won't regret the possum relocation program, but they are kind of scary looking when they hiss and show their teeth.

Now, I need to turn my attention to those pesky voles invading my yard. Grrrr!

Carol,

Well, I simply cannot resist (no how, no way!), sharing with you this recipe for Daryl. It is from Fannie Flagg's "Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook", where it is one of two recipes in the "Possum and Veal" section. Thankfully, the other recipe in that section is for Veal Parmigiana. It isn't for stew, but it is (supposedly) a very tasty possum recipe.

I've never used this recipe myself, but Fannie says this at the top of the page "For Yankees or anyone else who cannot locate possum, substitute pork".

ROAST POSSUM

1/2 cup herb stuffing mix

1/4 cup golden raisins

1/4 cup chopped pecans

2 tablespoons chopped onion

2 tablespoons chopped celery

2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

1/2 teaspoon rubbed sage

1/2 teaspoon dried Italian seasoning

1 plump possum; or two 1-lb. port tenderloins

1 lemon, cut in half

salt

pepper

1/2 cup apricot jam

2 tablespoons bourbon

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Combine first 8 ingredients in a bowl; mix well. Rub tenderloins with cut halves of lemon and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Make a lengthwise slit down the center of each tenderloin, cutting to within 1/2 inch of the bottom. Open up the tenderloins. Fill the centers of tenderloins with the stuffing mix, pull together the outer edges of the tenderloins together over the stuffing and tie each tenderloin with kitchen string.

Place stuffed tenderloins on a rack in a shallow baking pan.

Bake 30-40 minutes or until meat is done.

Transfer to a serving dish.

Combine the apricot jam and bourbon and spoon over the meat.

Yield: 8 servings.

This is my favorite cookbook overall as it is full of old southern recipes for the kinds of food I grew up eating, though I surely did not grow up eating possum. I'm going to make Fannie Flagg's Banana Split Pie for tonight's dinner, using a recipe from this cookbook. And, for the record, if I ever make the above recipe, it will be with pork tenderloins, not possum tenderloins.

There is no solution for voles in a garden. Our cats will kill them for a while but they get tired of them. With 10 acres of woodland on our property, we have an endless supply of pine voles, although they did not invade my garden until we'd been here at least 10 years. To protect root crops from them, I grow all root crops in tall raised beds lined with hardware cloth to keep them from eating the crops underground. Other than that, trapping them works, but it is slow, and if you have an endless supply coming from wildland around you, you'll never get them all. I hate voles. For some reason, our cats killed and ran off all the moles and gophers we had when we moved here, and they made a big dent in the vole population, but the voles came back strong. The moles and gophers did not come back.

Dawn

My father had a pet possum while growing up near Siloam Springs. When I traveled for an insurance company in Georgia during a summer in law school days, I found people making "pets" of raccoons. Animals are what you perceive them to be

LOL, Dawn! Sounds delicious....with pork! I'm squeamish about cleaning fish and cannot imagine a possum! Yuck. I have more cookbooks than I need, but I like old ones (I have a 40's version of "The Joy of Cooking" that includes a fairly simple recipe for puff pastry my Ohio grandma used to make.) I found yours online here: Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook

Cochise, I knew an older lady in my very early gardening days who talked about raising a young possum and more than one person who has made a pet of a raccoon. While I think raccoons are look cute and apparently are interesting, I've seen what they do to chickens and have heard stories about what they can do to dogs. I think I'll stick to dogs and cats, lol.

Carol, I was thinking that somebody (it sure wouldn't be me!) would have to process that possum and produce some possum tenderloins in order for anyone to make that roast possum, so it seems easier to me to just go and buy some pork tenderloins, because I am NOT ever, in this lifetime or any other, going to cook or eat possum.

I love the Whistlestop Cafe Cookbook so much that I have contemplated buying a second copy just in case anything ever happens to my current copy. It is food like my aunts (most of whom are now gone) used to make, and it is the kind of food I grew up eating. There's probably many adequate and similar recipes for similar food online now, but I like using old, tried and true southern style recipes. My Aunt Osa used to make pecan cream pie, which requires brown sugar. Did she buy brown sugar from the grocery store? Nope. She just browned white sugar in her cast iron skillet. You just don't see many recipes any more that tell you to brown your own sugar (or that tell you how to do it) but I remember watching her stand at the stove in her little kitchen and do that very thing. I remember her frying okra in that same cast-iron skillet, and it wasn't heavily breaded okra like you buy in bags in the freezer section or get on a plate at a restaurant either. I don't want to loose those southern cooking skills, so I cling to old southern recipes.

When we were kids, my cousin and her dad rescued a baby raccoon that apparently had been abandoned by its mother (or maybe the mother died) and that was sitting in a tree in their backyard. While it was a fascinating pet, it had to live in a cage in the backyard and was prone to bite anyone who stuck a finger into the cage. I can live without pets like that. Every now and then the coon would escape and climb high into an old oak tree and sit there, but it never ran off. When it got hungry enough, it returned to its cage so someone would feed it.

Cats and dogs are about the only pets I want to raise now, though our chickens think they are pets (though I prefer to think of them as egg producers myself).

Dawn

Just thought I'd update y'all on how successful our relocation program has been. We trapped number 7 last night and it's on the way to a new home!

Number Seven? Good heavens! Somebody in the Possum World has been busy procreating and populating your area. Congrats on the successful trapping and relocation. Our general rule of thumb for all wildlife is that they are free to live on, roam around and visit our 14.4 acres (they were here first) as long as they (a) stay out of our garden and (b) aren't preying upon our animals. Anything killing our animals, or even attempting to kill them, gets chased off or shot. Well, not birds of prey (which are protected by law), but actual varmints.

We haven't had nearly the raccoon problem or possum problem in recent years, ever since a huge number of distemper cases hit the wild raccoon population in Texas across the river from us a few years back. It must have killed off a lot of coons, because prior to that they were a constant problem and since then they haven't been. I'm not sure what's become of the possums or if they were affected by the same thing, or how much both populations were affected by the repeated Red River flooding last year and this year. For whatever reason, though, we haven't had coons, many possums or even that many skunks lately.....not that I am complaining.

#8 is on his way to the creek (at least 5 miles away.) I understand mama possums only have 13 teats, so I'm hoping we're almost done.

I've never seen a mama carrying more than 6 or 8. Let's hope that y'all only have one mama possum. I'm starting to understand why I've only seen one or two possums this year----all the rest of them are attending a convention at your place.

Do you mark them? Maybe it's the same ones who just come home?

LOL, Amy, that is so true. One year, my friend's brother had a huge corn patch and the coons were getting his corn before it was even ripe. Granted, his garden was not fenced (which helps, but usually not enough) and he lives much closer to the river than we do, so I'd expect he has more coons. Anyhow, determined to save his huge crop of field corn, he set a trap, and then shot each coon he trapped. Every single morning he removed one raccoon from the trap and shot it. That way, he knew it wouldn't come back after being released elsewhere. For 18 days/nights he trapped and shot a single raccoon. On the morning of the 19th day, there was no coon in the trap. It didn't matter. By the 19th day, the coons had totally destroyed his large corn patch. The lesson he learned from that was to trap them earlier the next year.

Sandplum, what part of Seminole County are you in ?

My Grandad farmed in north Seminole County. From the Catfish Roundup and Loves Country Store at hwy 99 and I-40 , his farm was one mile south and 1/2 mile east. He farmed there from the 20's through about post WW II, when all of his sons moved to California, cept my Dad who moved to town after coming home from the War, and Grandad sold the farm and moved to town with him . No more cheap labor :)

They grew cotton and peanuts, depending on which crop could make the most money.

Dawn, I suspect the mama possum found entry under our house and had her litter there. We probably just weren't paying attention to how much the cats were eating. (We have a tendency to just fill the bowl, not knowing exactly when one or the other is filling it. )

Amy, the closest my husband was releasing the possums was 5 miles away and that was crossing a highway, so I don't think they were finding their way back. (I asked after the third one, because we do have a creek about a half mile from the house.) To be sure, he started releasing them at a creek closer to his work, which is over 30 miles from the house.)

We had to cut one of the wires on the cage yesterday morning because the possum because it had its bottom jaw trapped, trying to bite its way out. It was trying to play possum, but those claws were wrapped tightly around the wires on the sides. It "woke up" immediately when we got it loose! Poor guy. I don't hate them; I just don't want them living under the house (and eating the cat's food.)

lcdollar, we are almost midway between Seminole and Wewoka (closer to the latter) just off Highway 9. My grandparents lived and farmed between Earlsboro and Maud from at least 1917 to early 1929 (my dad was born in March, 1929) about a mile west of the Pott County/Seminole County line.) They moved to Stratford and sharecropped on my grandpa's uncle's (Frank Day) land there for many years before moving to town also. I've heard many stories about my aunts, uncles, and my dad picking cotton. He was well known for his "Williamson's white corn" also. If you knew any Beasleys from the Earlsboro area, they were probably related to my grandma and my great aunt Annie Taylor and her husband lived in Seminole for many years as well. Wouldn't it be interesting if our families knew each other? Oh, and I teach at Varnum, so I'm familiar with the area your family is from.

Carol

You're not far from Sportsman Lake and Wewoka Lake ?

Varnum was about a mile as the crow flies , from the house where I grew up, on Hwy 9, north of Seminole.

My Grandad's first farm was in the Pleasant Grove school district, west of town , near Earlsboro. My Dad was born in the farmhouse there, in 1922. But it was not long till they moved north.

Dad sold insurance in Seminole for 35 years, and I see the fella who bought the agency in 1988 has not changed the name , its still Sullivan-Dollar Ins.

I'm a little north of the 2 lakes, lc, near Del Marr Lake (on the side accessed via Hwy 9.) Our tiny lake was built by the Corps of Engineers to alleviate a flood plain and feeds into Coon Creek, which is a tributary to Wewoka Lake.

We've had several good kiddos who transfer over from PG. Sure hated that Seminole closed the school. I noticed from one of your earlier posts you were from Seminole and wondered if you were connected to the insurance company. How interesting that our families lived so near each other. It's a small, small world, isn't it?

Carol