How we got rid of a opossum in our backyard.
Now that the weather is better, we started spending a lot of time in our backyard, working on the vegetable garden and just hanging there in the sun.
And much to our surprise and disgust there was someone else spending their time in our backyard too! We would have been ok to share the backyard with them if they had the decency to clean up after themselves!
There were droppings in the grass day after day and the situation was getting worse! The only person who was getting a thrill from it all was Kiki. He would wake up in the morning and plead to go out to look for any fresh delivery that we might have received the night before.
At first we blamed it on the neighbor's cat, she was a pretty frequent visitor and was pretty nonchalant about her presence in our yard.
She wouldn’t mind continuing her stroll even if she spotted us, but we noticed she seldom climbed down the fence.
And then we saw him! A big fat possum, enjoying a freshly fallen orange and just basking in the sun. And after his big meal, he felt completely at home and relieved himself in the bright green grass in the broad daylight.
Enough was enough!
Now, we are not expecting him to have human decency and carry on his private tasks a little more.. Well, privately. But to not be bothered about his audience was a whole new audacity.
So I did what I do best! I started researching how to get rid of possum in the backyard.
Let me tell you this , the internet is a very funny place and people have all sorts of ideas that you can use to scare off a possum.
From scattering dogs' hair to spraying coyote piss (yes you can buy that on Amazon!).
Vicky refused to be a part of this craziness. There was no way he was going to touch the self proclaimed Coyote Urine and spray it around our yard.
I was pretty frustrated at this point, the search was leading nowhere productive! While I was still on my phone trying to look for a better solution, the beloved possum decided to pay a visit again!
I told the kids, possum is scared of Coyote, lets pretend to be coyotes and scare him off.
We opened the backyard door and screamed and roared and howled and everything in between. The noise was enough to set our neighbor’s dog on alert and he joined the commotion too!
Mr Possum, who was unnerved by our presence the last time, started running away!!!
Now kids and I got more excited and howled louder, I got hold of Kiara’s soccer ball and much to her horror, threw it towards the possum. Kiara’s howls now turned into screams. All in all we made enough noise to scare the possum out of our backyard that night.
As proud as we were of our little act of defiance, Vicky was horrified! He thought we had clearly lost our minds. To tell you the truth, between the howls and the laughing fit, I thought so too! But who cares, we were having fun and were scaring our unwanted guest away!
Now I am not the one toot my own horn(actually, I clearly am!) but the possum never returned!
Maybe he found a better dumping ground which is not occupied by noisy humans or maybe he actually thought a weird coyote-wolf-dog-lion lives in the yard and he was better off without the sour oranges anyways.
Whatever may be the case, the kids believed that we scared the possum off! And they were so happy and animated when they shared the story of how we scared the possum away!
And I never leave a good opportunity to remind them that sometimes all you have to do is to stand up for yourself and shout NO!
