‘Made it onto the island’: Montreal home to growing number of opossums

There is a growing number of opossum sightings on the Island of Montreal, which until recently was too cold to play host to North America’s only marsupial.

One evening last fall, Robert Carrière was putting away some gardening tools when he saw something scurry out from under the shed.

At first, he thought it was a big rat. Then he thought maybe a muskrat.

What it was, it turned out, was an opossum. It was hanging out near a collective garden at a college in northeastern Montreal, and Carrière, a volunteer at the garden, wasn’t the only person to see one that fall. A campus security guard managed to snap a photo in late October of what is unmistakably an opossum: white face, brown fur and long, naked tail.

“I thought to myself, ‘Wow,’” Carrière said. “‘It’s come from far away.’”

The episode is one of a small but growing number of opossum sightings on the Island of Montreal, which until recently was too cold to play host to North America’s only marsupial. Many Montrealers, and even some biologists, are unaware that opossums are already living among them. But scientists believe the animals will eventually become a fairly commonplace backyard critter on the island — if not as abundant as squirrels or raccoons.

Stéphane Lamoureux, a biologist with the Quebec Environment Department, said he’s been getting sporadic reports of opossums in Montreal for the last decade and that the number of calls is on the rise. He’s had about a dozen so far this year, he said.

“It’s certainly a new species, and people aren’t used to seeing them,” he said. “So people often have a lot of questions about it.”

Like kangaroos and koalas, opossums are marsupials that raise their young in pouches. They can have more than 20 babies at a time, though many of them won’t survive. Those that do can be seen clinging to their mother’s back as she searches for food. They’re mostly nocturnal and are adept scavengers in urban environments, often hiding under sheds or using old groundhog burrows for shelter.