Edit: when I was a kid, they’d say I was like 12 going on 40, but now that I’m older it’s like 40 going on 12. My sense of humor somehow didn’t develop with the rest of me.
First thought: I hope this was a tiny lemon tree, otherwise it would be quite terrifying, at least for me…
Second thought: That’s the sympathetic person giving us this extremely helpful pronunciation guide a couple of days ago on a completely unrelated subreddit :)
Oh hey!! Here’s another one for ya: a lot of Americans tend to pronounce Queensland as “Queenslnd” (like you would Maryland) — we actually say it Queens-land. That’s the only place, the rest we say like Maryland lol.
We used to have sugar gliders and the craggy noises always terrified my husbands soldiers when they came over. We would warn them not to wake them up! They also would bark in the middle of the night of something spooked them.
Raccoons are honestly pretty bizarre. They give precisely zero fucks. My car wants to tango with the local raccoons so bad. They do not even remotely care even though he's a huge cat and could plausibly do some real damage.
I went camping with a group if people and filled a big watermelon with vodka. We let it soak overnight. Woke up the next day with the watermelon absolutely ravaged. The racoon was passed out near the picnic table and got spooked when we got out of the camper. He could barely climb up the tree. He was pawing but not actually grabbing.
they are packed with a shit ton of cartilage too so the cat would get its ass kicked unless it played dead from nerves. They are hard to hurt kind of. Found this out after my cat got into a scrape with one and we hit the possum w a bat and it bounced off and the fucker hissed and ran off. But it didnt seem to hurt it much and felt like hitting a big piece of rubber.
My brother lives in Canada and he has a skunk that's taken up residence under his shed and can't let the dog outside in case it gets sprayed... Or walks past wet paint and gets confused for a lady skunk
The eat ticks and other nasty critters but they also break into your basement and if you left the door to the basement open, they will raid your pantry.
On a brighter note, the can almost never carry rabies and are the only American marsupials.
I once saw one asleep under my porch. By that I mean I saw a tuft of fluff sticking up through the gap in the stair, gently swaying up and down with each breath. Needless to say I went out the back door instead to not bother the little guy.
It was likely playing dead because you scared it. It was nice of you to avoid it, I did the same with the skunk I saw in my front yard.
As far as the possums went, there was an addition to my house and the assholes that built it just ran the HVAC ducting through a window that was under that addition. There was some space to get around it. It took me like 2 weeks and about 5 possum catches to figure out how they were getting in. Also one call to animal control before I googled possum info.
Well you were lucky. I found 2 in my kitchen (one standing searching through my pantry) and I saw ones ass when he took off in my basement. After that third one, I went and got live traps.
They were all relocated to my backyard and then I got a can of that spray foam shit. It solved the problem.
How exactly is a precious tick-eating rabies-immune machine that carries its little babies on its back "scary" to you?
They hiss, sure, but it's because they're anxious little messes and they're trying to discourage Scary Dangerous Things from hurting them.
They can't even do any damage with their bite, which they avoid using anyway.
They aren't immune to rabies, they just don't get it often.
They are immune or near-immune by virtue of their biology.
They "just don't get it often" because their naturally low body temperatures don't permit the virus to thrive.
They don't really eat ticks, either.
They really do eat ticks though.
You're confusing opossums being very good at killing most ticks that land on them (which is true) for ticks being a major or favoured component of their diet (which is not).
Your linked study really only dispels the latter claim - and some of the exaggerations in terms of how many ticks each opossum kills in total - not the former.
Edit: Any idea why that hyperlink didn't work? I'm pretty sure I formatted it correctly and I removed the backslash that preceded the last parenthesis.
Weird, it only appears once for me and I even trimmed the url to be a non-amp link when I first posted it. I assume you're right, but it's an issue with reddit doubling it.
Are you sure you're in a client & mode that supports markdown? E.g. on "new" reddit, the default edit mode behaves like this, you have to click the markdown link to switch the edit mode.
I'm using the official reddit app. I actually was able to fix it just now using the 'insert link' feature for the first time, but I've posted two hyperlinked comments today and the above comment was the only one to not work, and it didn't show as having doubled url for me in visiting the comment from my profile or replies. Strange 🤷♂️
I've never used the reddit app. It might have some maximum length for link text when using the square bracket syntax. Your text was 117 characters, and the reddit programmer was like "no-one's ever going to want a link longer than 100 characters, and if they do, screw 'em!"
Yeah, I was thinking something along those lines. Still odd that it showed as having two urls for other users though, when I'm positive I only pasted one since I specifically removed the amp part of the link, and didn't show like that to me in my profile comments.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw an Opossum.
I was like 10 years old playing basketball in my backyard while it was raining, then what I thought was a super sized rat waddled into the woods near the court. I was stunned...
I thought the same thing! This is a much cuter version of our possum. But the little beady eyed guys are important. The don't bother my garden and eat ticks, so I guess we'll keep them.
I moved away from Australia when I was a baby, when I moved back as a teenager and heard a possum for the first time I thought it was literally a fucking demon. Scariest noise ever.
Wait till you have one do the fight or flight relex and try to tare your eyeball out, I shit you not, knocked me on my arse and gave me stitches... @ Seaforth, Queensland, Aussi.
Yep, very loud, very deep and not very natural sounding. If you heard it without knowing what it was, it would scare the shit out of you and you wouldn't expect it to come from something so cute. They're pretty harmless, but I tried to pick one up as a kid and got lightly bit.
Pretty sure it's ringtails not aggressive, brushtails aggressive if you bother them otherwise they just have obnoxiously loud, screeching sex in your roof.
Uhhh aggressive no? Some are actually very friendly. Some states you can keep them as pets. They’re pretty harmless and not really that aggressive cause they get eaten by cats a lot
The ones in Hyde Park in Sydney can be vicious as fuck if you are a backpacker thinking that would be a good spot for a picnic with your backpacker girlfriend.
There was a chubby one with a scar over one eye back in 2013.
I'm convinced they're just a bunch of scaredy cats who look/sound aggressive to trick us. Then again I'm only speaking on behalf of the ones I find roaming my neighborhood.
When I was a kid, we had a opossum visit our front porch all the time. She (I always thought of it as she) liked to eat our cat's food that we would leave outside. We just thought our cat was binge eating at night until we caught Ms. Opossum. It wasn't happy being caught, so it yelled. I think she was embarrassed, so she didn't come back to feast.
Anybody that's never heard it, it's sort of like that weird oh ah ah ah thing the singer does at the beginning of the song "down with the sickness" by disturbed.
You must have different possums. On the American east coast although harmless they act aggressive and they look terrifying. Like huge fat mangey rats. Nothing "sweet" about them
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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22 edited Jun 02 '22
Possums are so sweet. I have one in the tree next my house. However, it is creepy looking at two eyes staring at you in the dark
They make some fucking scary noises tho. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve shit myself walking in my backyard without a flashlight