Opossums are often considered a nuisance around your home and yard, especially when they feed on plants, rummage through garbage cans, and steal your pet’s food. Controlling a opossum problem can be tricky, so it’s best to call a professional who can humanely and effectively get rid of your unwanted houseguests.

Features of Opossums

There are more than 65 species of opossums living throughout the world, but only the Virginia opossum, is native to North America. Despite their resemblance to rats, opossums are marsupials, allowing the mother to carry her infants inside her pouch to nurse and develop.

As adults, opossums’ features include being three feet in length including the tail, 6-20 pounds in weight, and greyish-white in color. They have hairless ears and prehensile tails, 50 teeth, almost all used for crushing or grinding, and five fingers on the front feet with four fingers and opposable thumbs on the rear feet.

Understanding Opossum Habits

While opossums prefer living in wooded areas or open fields near streams, they will also live in abandoned burrows, brush piles, tree crevices, or areas underneath steps, decks, and sheds. Nocturnal and active at night, you may not physically see opossums wandering into your yard, but they regularly enter residential neighborhoods in search of easily accessible food and water. Opossums are omnivores, eating food of both plant and animal origin, and will eat things on your property like fruit, plants, pet food, and garbage.

How to Prevent Opossums from Invading Your Property

If opossums get onto your property, they most likely will not cause significant damage, but they will create a mess for you to clean up. There are certain preventative measures you can take to make your home less attractive such as:

• Taking pet food inside at night
• Removing spilled bird seed
• Removing brush or trash piles
• Storing firewood away from buildings and fences and at least a foot off the ground
• Keeping garbage can lids secured on the containers
• Checking your home for needed repairs
• Denying access to sheds or spaces underneath decks or porches

Let Us Help

Sometimes residents aren’t sure of where to start when wanting to begin their own animal control. You can be confident that Critter Control of Miami has the experience to address all areas of your home that may be attracting opossums or other unwanted wildlife. We take pride in offering CritterSafe, our humane wildlife management option that includes non-lethal animal removal, no-trap animal control, releasing wildlife on-site, and one way doors to help minimize the stress we put on the animals we are relocating. If you’ve noticed your home could be susceptible to critter invasions, prevention is the best step in animal control. Call us today at 305-363-7136 or contact us online for a free estimate.