Animal Encounters-Gliders & Little Possums

Glider, Sugar Glider that is.  Sugar Gliders are marsupials, distant relatives of kangaroos.  They look and act like flying squirrels.  If they are bottle-fed and handled regularly from infancy they make exceptionally affectionate pets.  If they aren't handled early, they can be awful pets, as we found a few years ago,  An unsocialized sugar glider is an escape artist, with a propensity for hiding between the ceiling and the ceiling tile.  It is very difficult to catch because if you corner it in one part of the room it can jump over your head and glide to the other side of the room.  If you actually catch the glider it'll make a sound like a cross between a rattlesnake and a wind-up toy, then bite you hard and often, like a miniature sewing machine.  We called our Sugar Glider Mel, and worked hard to socialize him.  We   got him to the point where he would take food from our hands and even let us pet him on rare occasions while he was earing.  We suspended a large hamster wheel from the side of its cage and Mel spent a lot of time running in that.  The wheel was also a kind of security blanket for him.  Mel ran to the wheel and did a few turns in it whenever anything scared or upset him. 

Mel was amazingly strong and agile for his size.  One time I had to take its wheel out of the cage to clean it.  Mel was upset at losing his wheel and immediately started jumping from one side of the cage to the other, then launching himself in a backflip to the other side of the cage.  The cage was three feet wide and Mel no more than six inches long, but the glider made both the jump and the return backflip look easy.  These weren't glides.  They were purely jumps, and Mel did at least half a dozen of them before he settled down.  Mel reminded me of a monkey.  He was noisy, a messy eater, and very much a creature of heights.  He almost never went to the bottom of his cage.

Little Possums.  I actually had one as a pet.  It wasn't one of the big dirty-white 'possums you see laying along the road.  It was a short-tailed opossum, about the size of a large gerbil.  Short-tails are from South America.  They've become reasonably common lab animals, and the one I got apparently derived in some way from the lab animals.  I called mine Maya, and she was my all-time favorite pet, although I'm not sure why.  She didn't really do much except eat and sleep.  She had one trick though.  Short-tail is a relative term for opossums, and Maya had a fair-sized tail that she used to grab things just like a monkey would.   If you put a paper towel in her cage she rolled it up in her tail and carried it up to her nest. 

If Mel reminded me of a monkey, Maya reminded of me a cat in some ways, though not in others.  Maya was never even remotely playful, but she was by no means slow or dull-witted.  She ate crickets, and I could toss four or five into her cage, knowing that she would catch all of them before they had a chance to jump out between the bars.  If you've ever had to try to catch crickets you know that's impressive.  

Maya was a collection of finely tuned instincts rather than of thought,  She was totally fearless when she was in her cage. It didn't seem to occur to her that something might consider her prey.  She walked right up to the cage bars and touched noses with a barking Samoyed, even though each bark made her jump an inch in the air.  She got out of her cage a couple of times and showed an entirely different side of herself.  Outside of her cage she was wary and very difficult to catch.  I finally discovered that if I left her cage open she would come back to it.

Short-tails are supposed to be omnivores, but Maya rarely ate anything that wasn't moving.  I usually fed her insects, but a few times I couldn't find any and I had to feed her mice.  The first time I did that I was afraid that the mouse might hurt her, because it was almost as big as she was.  I didn't need to worry.  She grabbed the mouse by the throat before it even realized there was anything else in the cage.  I could see the life fade from its eyes as the mouse died.  I tried very hard to avoid feeding her mice after that, but I did have to one other time to keep Maya from starving.  This time the mouse saw Maya coming and tried to run.  I had a sudden flash of a mouse-eye view of Maya, nightmarishly huge, and all tooth and jaw in the few seconds before Maya caught and killed the mouse.  I managed to avoid feeding her mice after that.