Well, I spoke too soon when I said I rid the house of the opossum the other night. Kelly came to get me around 9 PM last night, saying she heard it scratching under the office floor. Tough little bugger, I thought. Since it didn’t get out the night before its been at least a week since it left the house.
I had to do something different this time. I remember during my weekend research that a good trick to know if an opossum has come or gone is to sprinkle flour at the entrances. If the critter makes tracks, you know its been there.
So that’s what I did. I opened a vent cover on the far side of the house and sprinkled flour on the opening. For good measure, I went to the opossum’s preferred doorway (the original hole it dug under the house), parted the brick pavers I placed above it, and gave it the flour treatment, too.
An hour later I was ready for bed but decided to check for opossum tracks before retiring. Sure enough, the one by the hole had been hit! There was flour not only on the pavers where I placed it, but flour pushed off the paver and onto the ground. Finally, proof that the critter was out!
I closed up the vent and hole again and went to bed. This morning there are no signs it tried to get back into the crawlspace – a place that might have easily been its tomb. Now to clean up the after effects and seal things up where this doesn’t happen again.