We can now add opossum to our list of animals we've seen in our backyard. Angela spotted this guy late one evening as we were sitting down for dinner. I quickly grabbed my camera and tried to take a few shots in the dim light through the dining room window before he took off. I had very little time, and it was quite dark, so I just threw the camera into manual mode, cranked the ISO all the way up, opened the aperture all the way, and set the shutter speed to 30 and hoped for the best.

This was one of the better photos I managed to get. I've never seen an opossum before, so this was quite a treat. It is hard to get scale from this photo, but he was pretty big! I think this also solves a mystery that we had here back in February. One morning we woke up to find a long straight trail through the snow in our backyard. Naturally I tried to identify the creature that made the trail. The trail was deep and trough-like, so it wasn't made by a cat or a rabbit, and the footprints inside were offset, so it wasn't made by a squirrel or any hopping creature. The best theory I had was that the groundhog was back... but the path of the trail didn't make any sense, especially since I had seen a groundhog walking through the snow a few weeks ago and it made a completely different pattern.

Well, I now believe that the trail through the snow was made by this opossum! After I took this photo, he ran back behind the shed (where the snow trail had originated), climbed up the stone wall and slipped under the fence into the neighbour's yard. We haven't seen him since... but I'm sure he's out there somewhere. Hopefully next time I can get a better photo!

Technical details: This photo was taken with my Rebel XT + 70-300 IS at 300mm, ISO 1600, f/5.6 for 1/30th of a second, with +1 digital exposure compensation plus a lot of noise reduction, contrast and saturation.

Comments

Wow! I've never seen an opossum before either.	I think the photo turned out
really well.  Amazing you could get such a good one with so little time.

Thanks!  I also forgot to mention that it was so dark out that my autofocus
wasn't working, so it was shot with manual focus too.

There was an opossum in my back yard too just this past weekend.  Looked just
like this guy!	He was just snooping around, and I watched him root around all
my patio furniture for a while.

Well, when I last saw this guy a couple of weeks ago, he was heading towards
your house.  Maybe it's the same one!  :)