Orphaned possums!

Five Little Lives

Our Saturday did not go as planned, but a day that started with sadness, tension and adrenaline came to an end with an incredible feeling of happiness.

With plans for tailgating and football at Castleton University, I was up and out the door early for a planned eight-mile run. Not quite 1.5 miles in, I came upon a mother possum, dead in the road, one lifeless baby beside her, two others wriggling on the pavement, and a pouchful more crying and trying to nurse.

I didn’t have a phone, so I ran back home, and while my wife Jane put together a box with a blanket, towel and gloves, I got on the phone seeking an animal rehabber for advice. The first one I reached couldn’t take the babies, but told me how to remove them from the mom’s pouch.

“You’ll have to unscrew the babies from the mother,” she said. “What’s the saying? Lefty-loosey. Turn them counterclockwise, and they will eventually release.”

Jane and I raced back to the scene, parked to prevent traffic from running over me and the babies, and I approached the mother. One baby that had been out of her pouch was now dead, too.

I put on rubber gloves, slipped the other loose baby into the box, and pulled the mother’s pouch open – where four more squirming babies were still trying to suckle her.

I reached in, and just like the rehabber said, each one let go after a little turn to the left, and one by one I piled them together on the blanket, hoping they’d survive till we could get them to someone who actually knew what they were doing.

We drove home, and started calling licensed rehabbers (they are listed on the Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife’s website) and connected with a wonderful woman, Medora Plimpton at Howling Mountain Wildlife Rescue in Starksboro. A few minutes later, I was on the road for an 80-minute drive to meet Medora.

The possums, which were crawling all over each other in the box before we left home, were making tiny noises that sounded like a cross between a kiss and a small sneeze, a smoochy soundtrack that stopped a couple of times along the way. Worried that they had died or were dying, I scratched the side of the box and made a similar noise to see if they responded – and the chorus began again each time.

Medora met me in her driveway, and we brought the babies into her home, where she takes care of everything from orphaned bobcats to racoons and coyotes. She quickly cleaned up each baby, weighed them (they weighed between 35 and 39 grams each – about 2/3rds the weight of a candy bar – which she said made them likely eight to nine weeks old) and put them into an incubator to be sure they were warm. Food was to quickly follow – the care, the feeding and the concern all from a woman who is a nurse and volunteers her time to save orphaned animals. Her intern Maggie is now taking the lead on caring for these babies.

I’m sure some of you reading this are probably thinking - who cares if they lived or died? Animals get run over by cars every day, no doubt, and living in nature is brutal, with every creature fighting for its very survival every single day.

It would have been easy to have just kept on running, and let the hawks and crows have a free breakfast on the side of our road. No one would have thought much about the flattened carcass of the mother, or what the birds were picking at along her lower belly.

But in replanning our day and giving the survivors a chance at life, we got nearly as big a gift as they did: An incredible feeling of joy, the opportunity to see some of the cutest little animals imaginable up close, and big goofy grins we can’t seem to relinquish several days later.

This fundraiser aims to cover the costs of caring for these little orphans and other wildlife saved by Medora and her wildlife rehab center!