> > Another question that bothers me: Do 'possums really hang by their tail to sleep? The woods around here are full of the little critters, but I've never seen one dangling and snoozing.
> > Howard
>
> All the opossums I've ever seen were either lying dead in the road, lying dead on the side of the road, or slowly meandering into the road seconds before becoming dead.

The page below says the young sometimes swing by their tails, but don't sleep that way, and an adult is too heavy to support itself by its tail anyway.

The possums in NZ are the species called brushtailed possums in Australia, whence they were imported because some genius thought they'd do well here. Hooray, he was right. They're now everywhere, responsible for killing off huge amounts of native forest and devastating the environment, and the government has been trying to eradicate them for decades without much success.

Ironically, the same species is now endangered back in Australia, where it naturally belongs and where the environment can cope with its presence.

I don't think anyone here has heard of possums hanging by their tails; maybe it's just the American species that, er, don't really do that. Similar to the American species, however, the natural habitat of a NZ possum is smeared across a square metre of asphalt.

Brunnen-"everything they need to know about road safety, they learned from hedgehogs"G