What Do Possums Eat? Inside the Diet of Nature’s Cleanup Crew

Written By: Ian @ World Deer

Possums eat almost everything: insects, snails, slugs, earthworms, mice, carrion, eggs, frogs, snakes, fruits, nuts, and grains — plus pet food, garbage, compost, and fallen birdseed around homes. The Virginia opossum is one of the least picky eaters in North America, a wandering omnivore-scavenger whose diet is best summarized as “whatever tonight’s route provides.” That flexibility, more than any other trait, is how a slow, short-lived marsupial has spread from Central America to Canada.

A quick note on names: in North America, “possum” and “opossum” both refer to the Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), the continent’s only marsupial — the possums of Australia are different animals entirely. We use the words interchangeably here, the way everyone does over the back fence. For a full portrait of this odd and ancient animal, see our overview of the wonderful world of opossums; this article is about the menu.

The Ultimate Opportunist’s Diet

Food-habit studies of wild opossums keep finding the same thing: a bit of everything, in proportions that track whatever is locally and seasonally abundant. Insects and other invertebrates usually lead the list, followed by carrion, small vertebrates, and plant foods. An opossum has 50 teeth — more than any other North American land mammal — arranged for a generalist’s life: sharp enough for prey and carrion, flat enough in back to grind fruit and grain.

Invertebrates: beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, caterpillars, snails, slugs, and earthworms — often the single biggest food class, and a genuine service to gardeners
Carrion: roadkill and other found carcasses of every size; opossums are among the suburb’s most dedicated scavengers, cleaning bones nearly bare
Small vertebrates: mice, voles, shrews, frogs, lizards, and snakes — including venomous species, thanks to a remarkable natural resistance to pit-viper venom

Eggs and nestlings: ground nests are raided opportunistically, though less systematically than a raccoon works them
Fruits, nuts, and grains: persimmons, wild grapes, pokeberries, apples, blackberries, acorns, and waste corn, heaviest in fall and winter

The venom resistance deserves its own sentence, because it sounds invented and isn’t: opossum blood contains a protein factor that neutralizes snake venoms, a subject of ongoing antivenom research, and wild opossums do kill and eat rattlesnakes and copperheads. Combined with a famously robust immune system and a body temperature too low to suit many pathogens, the opossum is built to eat the things other animals can’t afford to touch.

Regional studies fill in the local color. In the rural Southeast, persimmons and pokeberries bulk up fall diets; in the Midwest, waste corn and grasshoppers; along coasts, opossums beachcomb for crabs and stranded fish; in cities, studies of urban opossums find garbage and pet food alongside the same insect base. No North American mammal of its size runs a wider menu, and almost none runs a shorter digestive pickiness list — the opossum’s gut and immune system tolerate carrion in states of decay that would sicken most carnivores.

How an Opossum Finds Its Food

Opossums are nocturnal wanderers rather than hunters. An adult ambles along a nightly circuit of fencerows, creek beds, and yard edges — often a mile or more — nose down, investigating everything, climbing when fruit or eggs call for it (that naked prehensile tail is a climbing aid, not a weapon), and remembering what paid. Laboratory work on memory for food locations found opossums outperform dogs and cats at recalling which runway arm held the food — a modest superpower that turns every reliable food source in your yard into a scheduled stop.

What they lack is speed and aggression. An opossum can’t chase down healthy adult prey and doesn’t try; virtually all its vertebrate food is nest young, the slow, the cornered, or the already dead. This is why the species coexists so quietly with cats, dogs, and people — nothing about its feeding style requires conflict.

Appetite scales with the wandering. An adult opossum weighs four to twelve pounds and, unlike the fat-banking raccoon, runs a lean, hand-to-mouth energy budget most of the year — a nightly intake somewhere around a few hundred grams of mixed forage, gathered one beetle, one windfall apple, one cleanup job at a time. It’s an economy with no savings account, which is exactly why winter, when the nightly gathering gets thin, reshapes the animal’s whole routine.

An Opossum’s Menu Through the Year

Season	Mainstay foods	Notes
Spring	Insects, earthworms, eggs, carrion, early greens	Females eating for a pouchful of growing joeys
Summer	Insects, snails and slugs, berries, small vertebrates	Peak invertebrate season; joeys begin riding the mother’s back
Fall	Persimmons, wild grapes, acorns, waste grain, insects, carrion	Heavy feeding — opossums fatten but do not hibernate
Winter	Carrion, seeds, pet food, garbage, anything findable	The hard season: food scarcity forces daytime foraging and drives yard visits

Winter is the pinch point. Opossums don’t hibernate and don’t store food, their naked ears and tails frostbite easily, and a cold snap can force a normally nocturnal animal out at midday just to keep its calorie budget balanced. A possum in the compost pile in January isn’t bold or sick — it’s broke. Winter food stress is a big part of why opossums live fast and die young: even without predators, few wild opossums see a third year, and the northern edge of the species’ range is drawn less by cold itself than by how many frostbitten, hungry weeks an opossum can string together on scavenge alone.

Reading Opossum Feeding Sign in Your Yard

Opossum feeding leaves quieter evidence than the rest of the night shift, which is why they’re so often blamed for other animals’ work. What an opossum actually leaves behind: a carcass or fruit fall neatly reduced overnight; a compost pile lightly rummaged rather than scattered; droppings that are smooth, tapered, and unremarkable (nothing like a raccoon latrine); and tracks that settle the question instantly — the hind print shows a splayed, thumb-like inner toe angling sideways, unlike anything else in the yard. What an opossum does not leave: cone-shaped lawn holes (skunk), rolled sod (raccoon), emptied feeders on greasy poles (raccoon again), or gnawed containers (rodents). If the damage involved strength, digging, or dexterity, acquit the opossum.

What Possums Eat Around Your House

Around homes, opossums take the same ground-level buffet as skunks, with a climbing bonus: pet food on the porch, garbage in loose cans, spilled seed under feeders, compost scraps, windfall fruit, and grease under the grill. They’ll climb fences and trees for fruit and occasionally raid an unsecured coop for eggs, but they open nothing — no latches, no lids — so modest housekeeping shuts nearly all of it down. If your nighttime visitor is instead flipping lids and unhooking bungees, you have a different guest; see what raccoons eat for that dossier.

Note what’s missing from the complaint list: gardens. Opossums do minimal plant damage — they’re after the slugs, snails, beetles, and grubs in the beds far more than the vegetables themselves, making them one of the more gardener-friendly visitors a yard can host. The occasional sampled tomato or ear of downed corn is the usual extent of it.

There’s a seasonal rhythm to the house visits, too. Yard traffic peaks in late summer, when the year’s juveniles disperse and every fence line has a naive teenager testing it, and again in midwinter, when cold-stressed animals push their hours and their range. If the porch camera suddenly features a small, ragged opossum in August or a slow, deliberate one in January, both are the calendar talking — not a population explosion.

Do Possums Eat Ticks? (The Honest Answer)

You’ve probably seen the claim that a single opossum eats 5,000 ticks a season. Treat it with caution. It traces to a 2009 study in which captive opossums exposed to larval ticks groomed off and apparently consumed most of them — the authors extrapolated that a wild opossum could destroy thousands of ticks a season. But a 2021 study that examined the actual stomach contents of wild-caught opossums found essentially no tick remains, and researchers have debated the question since. The fair summary: opossums are fastidious groomers that certainly kill some ticks they pick up, but the famous number is an extrapolation, not a field measurement, and opossums should not be counted on as tick control. They earn their keep in other ways — carrion, slugs, and rodents — no exaggeration required.

A last note on drink: opossums need surface water and reliably favor yards that offer it, which is why creek-adjacent neighborhoods and properties with ponds, low birdbaths, or chronically dripping spigots see the most traffic. In drought weeks, water outdraws food — an opossum drinking calmly from the dog’s outdoor bowl at midnight is one of the most common trail-camera captures in the suburbs, and the easiest to prevent if you’d rather not host: bring the bowl in with the kibble.

What You Should Never Feed a Possum

The best feeding policy is none: a fed opossum becomes a habituated opossum, and habituated wildlife loses every encounter with cars, dogs, and nervous neighbors eventually. If one visits, enjoy it and let it move along — opossums are naturally transient, rarely staying in one den more than a few nights. And never leave out the classic mistakes: milk (opossums are lactose-intolerant), processed food, or a standing buffet of cat kibble, which draws not one grateful opossum but every raccoon, skunk, and stray in the neighborhood. Wildlife rehabilitators, who feed orphaned joeys carefully balanced diets, are emphatic that a saucer of kibble and milk is a disservice dressed up as kindness.

Common Questions About Possum Diets

Do possums eat cats or attack pets for food?

No. An opossum cannot catch a cat or a dog and has no interest in trying; standoffs at the food bowl end with the opossum showing its teeth in a defensive gape, then waddling off or playing dead. The realistic food-related conflict is simply competition for kibble left outdoors — solved by feeding pets inside.

Do possums eat chickens?

Occasionally, and mostly eggs. An opossum that finds an open coop will take eggs, and rarely young or sickly birds; healthy adult chickens in a secured coop are effectively safe. Opossums neither dig seriously nor open latches, so a coop that stops a raccoon stops an opossum with room to spare.

Do possums eat rats and mice?

Yes — mice, voles, and young rats are regular prey, and opossums also clean up the rodent-attracting food waste other animals leave behind. They’re not a rodent-control program on their own, but a resident opossum works modestly in your favor on that front, one more entry on the credit side of the ledger.

Will a possum empty my bird feeder?

Not the feeder itself — opossums mostly work the ground beneath it, gleaning spilled seed and the occasional unlucky insect drawn to it. A pole baffle that stops squirrels stops an opossum easily. If seed is vanishing from the feeder overnight and the pole is greasy with handprints, that’s a raccoon’s work.