My son sent me a text about a small adventure. He was in Irvington’s Ellenberger Park one Friday afternoon and noticed a shoe box under a tree. He has always been a curious person, willing to track down mysteries, and in that vein, he wrote, “I went to take a peek inside…” He went to the tree, leaned down and opened the box. “There were two little baby possums in the box,” his text continued.
Chris has always had an interest in the secret lives of insects and animals. That interest in all the creatures, great and small, extended to his cultivation of praying mantises, the eggs of which he had collected in a great jar when he was about 7 years old. He and his sister were with me when we visited my friend in Southern Indiana, where the eggs hatched. Chris was concerned that the adult mantises were eating the babies, and his mother contacted Dr. Alan York of the entomology department at Purdue University. Chris’ sister’s participation in the Gifted Educational Resource Institute included her participation in “Super Saturday” science programs at Purdue, where the kids met Dr. York. Dr. York sent Chris wingless fruit fly culture to feed the mantises, and later, hissing cockroaches. (Which still give me nightmares.) His mother told me that she came home from work one day to find a wounded baby bird flying around the house. When he was older, he stopped his mother from spraying some ants that had invaded the kitchen and spent 45 minutes brushing the tiny things into a water glass and releasing them into the back yard.
When Chris and his sister Lauren were visiting with me in St. Louis, he saw and directed me toward a snapping turtle that was slowly making its way across the road. He gathered up the turtle — “They don’t travel too far from water, Dad” — and we took it to the St. Louis Zoo. “Nope,” said a zookeeper, “We don’t take drop-ins.” We took the turtle back to the section of road it had been crossing and placed it on the other side. Chris followed it into the rushes and, in a scene reminiscent of Pat Conroy’s description of baby sea turtles heading into the foam in his novel, “Beach Music,” we watched it enter the water it had been aiming for.
On this recent day, Chris left Ellenberger Park with the box of possums, went home, and spent some hours “calling every DNR number,” looking for a sanctuary for them. He drove the 40 minutes necessary to get to Sheridan Indiana, and delivered the possums to Sherry Inman, a licensed DNR rehabber. “I definitely wanted to raise them,” he wrote, continuing that he had recently learned how “harmless and beneficial” opossums are. He had grown up thinking, as many people do, that they were “pests” and “mean.”
Chris cannot turn away from creatures in need, be they ants, turtles, or possums. In his text to me, he wrote that he was trying to fill the void Steve Irwin left: “CRIKEY! Little joey opossums!” His concerns are echoed in the behavior of his niece, Imani, who has startled her mother with rescued baby turtles and fledgling Carolina Wrens. When her butterflies hatched from the kit she had received, she was concerned that one of them had a deformed wing. “How will it fly,” she asked her mother. They all flew away, eventually.
Chris wrote that the baby possums “are alive and healthy with some orphan siblings,” glad to have fulfilled his role as one of the “saviors of tiny little beings.”
cjon3acd@att.net
