Opossum Removal in Parma, OH

Opossums in your Parma home

The Virginia opossum is North America's only marsupial and one of Parma's most common nighttime animals. It is a wanderer by nature — an opossum may use several dens in a week — but a Parma lot with an open garage door gap, a shed with a rotted corner or a deck with an unscreened side offers a dry den plus food nearby, and wanderers become regulars. Most homeowners meet one face to face: frozen in a flashlight beam, mouth open, on top of the trash or under the bird feeder.

Opossums are not aggressive, and they are often unfairly blamed — they rarely carry rabies compared with raccoons or skunks. But an opossum denning in a garage soils stored items, tears into bags, and can die in an inaccessible corner. Ohio law also treats them specifically: like raccoons and skunks, opossums cannot be relocated off the property, so the solution is getting them out of the structure and taking the structure off their den list.

Where Parma opossums den on a small lot

Opossums climb well for their size and squeeze into any cavity at or above ground level: under decks and stoops, inside garages through a gap at the door corner, under sheds, in woodpiles against the house, and occasionally in an attic entered through a raccoon-sized opening someone else made. Females carrying young in the pouch — and later, riding on her back — den more consistently in spring and summer, which is when a garage opossum turns into a family. Droppings, a musty smell and disturbed pet food or trash are the indoor signs; outside, look for the five-toed tracks with the splayed thumb in mud or snow.

Ohio law: opossums stay on site

OAC 1501:31-15-03(E)(3) puts the opossum on the same list as the raccoon and skunk: a captured animal must be released on site or euthanized, never transported and released elsewhere. That is why our Parma approach is exclusion-led — encourage the animal out through a one-way arrangement where a den is occupied, or remove it from the structure directly, release as the rule provides, and immediately close the cavity it was using. Work for hire is done under Ohio's ODNR Commercial Nuisance Wild Animal Control Operator license (ORC §1531.40).

Playing dead, hissing, and what not to do

The opossum's famous collapse — going limp, mouth open, tongue out — is an involuntary stress response, not a performance and not actual death. A cornered opossum will hiss and bare a mouthful of teeth but almost never presses an attack; given an escape route and a minute, it leaves. Do not grab one, even a limp one: it can wake and bite, and any wild animal handled bare-handed is a bad idea. Keep dogs in until it moves off, and call us if it has taken up residence rather than passing through — a passerby needs nothing from you at all.

Sealing the garage, shed and deck

Opossums exploit small failures: a garage door that stops short on an uneven floor, a shed door that no longer latches, a rotted board at a deck skirt. The fixes are mechanical — a proper door seal, repaired boards, and hardware cloth screening on deck and stoop openings, buried at the bottom edge so digging animals cannot lift it. Because Parma structures sit so close together, the crew checks the neighboring cavities on the same lot in one visit; evicting an opossum from the garage while the shed stands open usually just changes its address by twenty feet.

Food and the winter picture

An opossum in a Parma winter is a hungry animal with poor insulation — their bare ears and tails suffer frostbite in hard cold, and they raid whatever is available: trash, compost, fallen feeder seed, pet food left in the garage. Bringing pet food indoors, securing cans and cleaning up feeder spill removes most of the reason to linger once the den is sealed. If one dies under a structure in winter despite everything, the smell arrives with the first thaw, which is its own reason to keep these cavities closed.