Saturday Suburban Wildlife Blogging

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We have been besieged lately by a possum who comes in through the cat door and hoovers up Domino’s cat food. This is Not Good. I tried and tried to trap him using cat food as bait, but he was too smart for that. He only wanted the food that was actually in Domino’s bowl. Then, a couple of days ago, I foolishly left a package of cookies on a coffee table that’s low enough to be possum accessible. When I woke up, it looked like a bomb had gone off in the living room. Cookie crumbs were everywhere.

Stupid possum. But a little while later I happened to be on the phone with my editor, Monika, who suggested that if the possum likes cookies, why not bait the trap with cookies? Good idea! So I bought more cookies, crumbled up a couple of them, and put them in the trap. No dice. So then my mother chimed in: the possum obviously doesn’t want crumbled-up cookies. He wants whole cookies that he can demolish himself. Fine. I put out a whole cookie.

And that was that. I finally trapped the possum. As you can imagine, he was not a happy possum during his brief imprisonment, but I drove him over to a local marsh and let him loose. It seems like pretty ideal possum territory, and it’s not too near any residential areas. Hopefully he’ll now spend a long and comfortable life in the company of his fellow critters.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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