Opossum Removal in Amherst, NY

Opossums in your Amherst home

The Virginia opossum is a traveler by design. It works the creek banks, wetland margins and wooded edges around the UB North Campus nightly, eating insects, snails, fallen fruit and whatever a porch feeding station leaves behind, and most nights it simply passes through Amherst yards. The calls begin when one stops passing: a garage entered through a door left up on a warm evening, the dry cavity beneath a low deck in Williamsville, a crawlspace with a door that no longer latches.

An opossum is a peaceable tenant and rarely carries rabies — its body temperature runs low for the virus. The problems it brings are domestic rather than dramatic: droppings and fouled bedding in the den corner, a musky odor that builds week by week, young raised where they should not be, and the winter ending no one plans for, when an older animal dies in a hidden void and the household learns about its tenant by smell.

Visitor or tenant: reading what is left behind

A passing opossum leaves almost nothing — perhaps a track in soft soil by the creek-side fence. A resident leaves a pattern: droppings concentrated in one garage or crawlspace corner, stored material dragged into a bedding pile in a single spot, outdoor pet food vanishing on a nightly schedule, and an odor that strengthens rather than drifts away. If the dog's nightly interest is fixed on one section of deck, believe the dog and have the void checked.

Garages: the open door and the corner behind the boxes

The classic Amherst opossum job starts with a garage door left up at dusk — after yard work, after a delivery, during a gathering — and an animal that slips in after the smell of pet food or trash. By morning it is wedged behind stored boxes, greeting the homeowner with the open-mouthed hiss and, if pressed, the famous collapse into apparent death. Both are bluff. It will not charge, but cornering or grabbing it is still poor practice, especially with a dog determined to help.

Under decks and in crawlspaces near the wet ground

Low decks and porch voids on lots backing onto creek or wetland ground are prime den sites: dry through lake-effect weather, dark, and entered through one rotted board or dug gap. Crawlspaces under additions run a close second where a vent has fallen open or an access panel has warped. These dens can hold an animal for a full season unnoticed, because an opossum is quiet and mostly nocturnal — until the odor, or a litter, announces it.

The passengers: pouch young ride with the tenant

A female opossum carries her young first in a pouch and then riding on her back, so the single animal hissing in the garage may be a household of a dozen. Removal has to account for the passengers, and a den occupied through spring may hold young too small to travel at all. Our crew checks the den completely before anything is sealed, because the follow-up call nobody wants is faint scratching from a void that was closed with young inside it.

The winter death in the void

Opossums are a southern species living near the cold edge of their range in Erie County, and hard winters thin them. An older or underfed animal denning in a crawlspace or wall void may not survive a cold snap, and a large Amherst house can hide that fact for days before odor gives it away. Prompt location and removal, plus closing the gap the animal used, is the entire remedy — and a call we would rather take in the first days than in the third week.

How the removal and the follow-through work

New York homeowners cannot carry a trapped animal off their own property, so the work is done by our crew under the DEC license: the animal is removed from the structure, the entry it used is closed, and the food draw that made the property worth stopping at is addressed in the same conversation — pet food in at night, fallen fruit picked up, trash secured, deck voids screened. An opossum evicted from a sealed, uninteresting property simply resumes its rounds elsewhere.