A Hangout for Playing Possums

MIRA LOMA â€”  Why, there’s the skittering of little possum feet on the roof. Can Santa’s sleigh be far behind? Let’s all sing:

“I’m dreaming of a gray possum, Just like the ones I used to know, Where their little eyes glisten, And their little ears listen, To hear food drop in their bowl. . .”

These festive lyrics come from the cover of the current ‘Possum Prints, the newsletter of the Opossum Society of the United States. The Irvine-based organization gets pretty mushy over possums. It rescues them from the yards and garages of misunderstanding humans, tends to them when they’re ill or injured, releases most into the wild and makes foster homes for those opossums that can’t adapt.

And as is apparent in Mel (short for Melinda) Smith-Dressler’s houseful of marsupials, the critters are bright (they’ve taught themselves to use a litter box, for starts), inquisitive and kind of endearing once you’ve let them nuzzle in your hair a bit.

But, cute lyrics aside, they don’t seem to take to holidays well. Smith-Dressler can’t buy a Christmas tree for fear her nine wards would climb and topple it. A trio of possums once scaled her bedroom curtains. She awoke to the sound of creaking curtain rods, “Then it just gave in and I had curtains and possums all over me,” she recounted.

This past Thanksgiving her most active possum, Weber, fell into the turkey grease and liked the wet look so much he refused to be washed. Who knows what might happen if they get into the bubbly on New Year’s Eve?

Most of Smith-Dressler’s possums remained unseen during our conversation. They sleep 20 hours a day, and tend to do most of their rambling between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.

Her most gregarious opossums, the midget Weber and “couch potato” Marcie, made their presence known, snuffling up a pants leg and leaping about the furniture. Possum hair, it turns out, is surprisingly soft, slightly more coarse than a cat’s, while the tail does indeed feel reptilian, as one might expect from a creature that has changed little since prehistoric times.

The house possums, for various reasons, can’t be returned to the wild. Weber refuses to grow. Others have health problems or have become so domesticated that they would lack the wiles to survive. The rescued animals that are going to be returned to unpopulated areas--Smith-Dressler’s released more than 100 this year--stay in pens in a half-acre back yard shared by a horse, two goats, a sheep, geese and other animals.

Smith-Dressler moved from Huntington Beach to Mira Loma, a newish dairy-stench-laden tract-home community north of Norco, because “it’s the closest I could be to Orange County and still keep a horse.”

She’s always loved animals, and first found she got along with opossums after one fell between the wall panels of an under-construction house in Huntington Beach. Her father pulled a panel off to find that the mother possum had died but the babies survived.

“And here we were, these adults wearing welding gloves afraid to go near this one little guy because he was growling at us. We finally caught them all and turned them over to the Opossum Society, and that’s when I started learning about them,” she said.

Her first live-in opossum was found in the parking lot of an Orange County eatery. “A friend said, ‘Look, a rat!’ And there was this poor terrified thing, running through the parking lot. I ripped off my sweat shirt, went running after it, got it and went home. She couldn’t be released, because she was alone and she was really sick with flea anemia. I raised her. She was such a great possum; she really opened the door for me into everything.”

One morning, Smith-Dressler was listening to KFI as a self-proclaimed “varmint catcher to the stars” gave out advice to a caller with a possum in her yard.

“He said all these wrong things about opossums. It’s 6 a.m., I’m getting ready for work, my hair’s soaking wet, but I called up to set them right. I wound up going down to the station with some possums. That snowballed into me going to work for Knott’s Berry Farm.”

An X-ray technician during the week, Smith-Dressler works weekends in the park’s petting zoo and animal education programs. She also acts as publicist for the Opossum Society.

“They’re very endearing creatures,” she said. “I can put one in my jacket and zip it up, and I can be down buying theater tickets and no one ever knows. They might think I’m a hunchback, but otherwise, no problem.”

She’s a massive fan of “The Phantom of the Opera” musical, having seen it 12 times and holding tickets for more performances. Marcie, she claims, will sit in front of blaring speakers at home listening to the cast recording.

The current ‘Possum Prints newsletter has a photo of Smith-Dressler with Phantom star Davis Gaines cuddling one of the opossums. Her accompanying story proclaims, “Onstage you’ll see a misunderstood creature of the night that really understands (and likes) our creatures of the night.”

“They really are maligned and misunderstood, and they’re such sweet creatures who just want to do their little thing and be left alone,” she said. “I rescued one from a little old lady’s house where it had gotten into a clothing bag up in her garage. This thing had never been handled by a person, yet I was able to reach in and get it out without it ever trying to bite me. How many wild creatures would understand you were trying to help them like that? They are very bright, up there with pigs.

“Everyone thinks raccoons and coyotes are the cute ones, and they’re the ones that cause all the problems, carrying disease and doing destruction. Possums are the underdogs, so my heart goes out to them.”

She likes to think of them as “nature’s little sanitation engineers.”

“They’re very quiet, non-destructive, very clean. What they do in nature is clean up the environment. When a community gets rid of its possums, it loses its snail and slug removal systems. They clean up a lot of junk. They eat grubs, insects, overripe fruit. They’re great vector control. They go after mice and rats. They kill any poisonous snakes. Their body temperature is typically too low to carry rabies. They do a lot of good. Plus, it’s having a bit of nature in your back yard.”

They also eat bird eggs and have been known to carry off puppies and kittens, though Smith-Dressler noted that’s only fair, since dogs and cats like to chow down on young possums too.

Adults cats and possums tend to get along better. She said she gets some calls from people telling her they’ve found possums sidling up to the food dish in peaceful coexistence with their cats. When baby opossums are born--in litters from one to 13--they are about the size of bumble bees. They crawl into their mother’s pouch, where they remain affixed to a nipple for another two months. When possums end up as “road pizza,” as they so often do, Smith-Dressler recommends checking a mother’s pouch for babies, which should be wrapped and kept warm, and taken to an Opossum Society member.

Most of the animals helped by the Opossum Society are placed in that need by human contact.

“They do fine in nature,” Smith-Dressler said. “As long as they stay in the woods they’re OK, but once they get in the road or somebody’s back yard and they get hit with a shovel or the babies get in the dryer vents, that’s the trouble. People think they’re big rats, or some horrible rabid animal. Animal control people used to just destroy them. Now they call us, and a lot of people now, once we’ve talked to them, decide to let the opossums keep living in their yard.”

Some of the ones she’s rescued had been living at Knott’s, where there is plenty of greenery and food for them. One was found curled up asleep in a big bag of peanuts it had eaten. Two other young possums had set up camp on a cot next to the dummy of Sad-Eyed Joe in the Ghost Town jail.

The ones that live with Smith-Dressler have the run of the house. She was recently divorced from a husband who she says didn’t share her love of animals. “That’s why he’s gone. I don’t know how I did that, marrying someone who didn’t like animals,” she said.

As we talked, Weber jumped on the kitchen counter, and next was spotted atop the refrigerator, reaching for a half-gallon ice cream container from the open freezer door.

“They aren’t destructive,” Smith-Dressler insisted with a laugh. “It’s the ice cream that’s destructive.