Blue Ridge Wildlife Center Patient of the Week – Virginia Opossum

This mama opossum was attacked by a dog. This may be due to her blood lead levels, which were high enough to cause clinical signs of the toxicity. Luckily, she was brought to us by Officer Gomez of the Warren County Virginia Sheriff’s Office.

Like eagles and vultures, opossums often scavenge on dead carcasses and gut piles left in the field. As a result, over 80% of our opossum patients suffer from some level of lead poisoning. This is especially hard on the babies as ingesting this level of lead through mom’s milk can have significant developmental impacts, as it can in the children of breast-feeding human mothers with elevated lead levels.

We chelated the lead (used drugs that bind the lead in the blood stream) to limit the impact and treated this mom for her dog attack wounds while she continues the challenging work of raising EIGHT babies! These babies are still a bit too small for us humans to raise with a high success rate, so despite the lead, they were kept with mom throughout her recovery. After she fully recovered, we were able to release her and her babies (still in her pouch)!

Virginia Opossums are such helpful animals – eating ticks and cleaning up roadkill, preventing diseases that impact humans and domestic animals. Yet they are constantly in danger from a variety of human-caused issues.

To protect our native wildlife, switch to non-lead ammunition and keep your pets inside, on a leash, or under close supervision when outside. These simple actions make a big difference to the health of our whole community!