Finding a Backyard Rescue: What Do Baby Possums Eat?

My oldest son, Jackson, is a walking cautionary tale for why you should never let a five-year-old play unsupervised near a woodpile. Yesterday, he came marching through the back door holding something gray, hairless, and wriggling in his hands like it was a prize-winning chicken nugget. My toddler immediately started screaming in delight, trying to shove her half-eaten graham cracker at the thing, while Jackson confidently announced he had found an orphan and needed a baby bottle right this second. She grabbed a marker and tried to write "baby po" on the side of a shoe box but ran out of room, so then she just started calling it Baby P, which I quickly shut down because giving wildlife a cute nickname is the first step to a hostage situation in my house.

If you live out in the country or even just have a decent-sized yard, your kids are probably going to drag some kind of wildlife into your kitchen at some point. And with a baby possum, the very first instinct every single mother has is to feed it, but I'm just gonna be real with you—doing that's a massive mistake.

Instagram will have you believing that every woodland creature wants to be swaddled in a beige muslin cloth and bottle-fed warm milk by a mother who somehow has perfect beach waves at 2 PM on a Tuesday. I'm here to tell you that social media is lying to you, and playing wildlife rehabilitator in your kitchen is a fantastic way to accidentally end a small animal's life.

The great milk lie

My grandma, bless her heart, grew up on a farm and swore that the cure for any abandoned animal was a bowl of warm cow's milk or a little bit of human infant formula. For three full paragraphs, I just need to rant about how incredibly dangerous this old wives' tale is. If you take anything away from this, please let it be that marsupials are basically the most lactose-intolerant creatures on the planet. If you give them regular milk or whatever formula you've left over in the pantry, it absolutely wrecks their digestive system, and they'll get severe, fatal diarrhea before you can even figure out what went wrong.

It gets worse, because baby possums don't even have a normal suckling reflex like human babies or kittens do. If you try to stick a standard rubber nipple or a pet nurser into their mouth, they can't swallow it properly, so the liquid just goes straight into their tiny lungs. The wildlife rehabber I eventually called told me that aspiration pneumonia from well-meaning humans with baby bottles is the number one thing that takes these little guys out.

And don't even get me started on the people who try to feed them cat food or kitchen scraps. From what I understand from my panicked late-night deep dive into wildlife forums, possums need some ridiculously massive amount of calcium to support their bones. If the calcium-to-phosphorus ratio is off by even a little bit, they develop this horrifying thing called metabolic bone disease where their bones literally turn brittle and deform. So basically, your good intentions and a can of Fancy Feast will just cause them a lifetime of agonizing pain.

Once they grow up they just roam around eating ticks, cockroaches, slugs, and literal garbage, which honestly makes them the best free pest control a rural Texas yard could ask for, but as babies, their diet is incredibly fragile.

What goes on inside the pouch

Apparently, these little guys are the only marsupials we've in North America, and from what I can wrap my head around, they don't even have a normal placenta. Because of this biological weirdness, they're born the size of a honeybee, which is just absolutely wild to think about. They spend their first couple of months just living inside their mother's pouch attached to a teat.

The rehabber explained to me that the mother's teat actually swells up inside the baby's mouth to lock them in place, which means they aren't actively sucking milk out of a bottle the way we picture it. They just kind of absorb specialized marsupial milk while they hang out in the dark. Licensed professionals have to use these super specific, expensive formulas like Fox Valley or some highly diluted goat's milk concoction, and they feed them with tiny little syringes because anything else is basically a death sentence.

Setting up a safe waiting room

Instead of trying to play woodland nurse and digging out your old pumping supplies, you really just need to shove the animal in a dark cardboard box with something warm and immediately call your local animal control or wildlife center. A cold baby possums system completely shuts down, so if you try to feed it while its body temperature is low, you'll send it straight into fatal shock.

I grabbed an old shipping box and realized I couldn't use our regular bathroom towels because their tiny, weird little claws can get tangled in terrycloth loops. I ended up sacrificing our Bamboo Baby Blanket in the Colorful Leaves design to line the bottom of the box. Look, I genuinely love this blanket for my actual human children because the 70% organic bamboo blend is ridiculously soft and it breathes so well in the Texas heat, plus it costs way less than those trendy boutique brands. I was honestly a little salty about putting my favorite baby care item into a possum rescue box, but it was smooth enough to keep his claws safe and warm enough to keep him alive until the professionals arrived.

While we waited, Jackson kept trying to comfort the poor thing by offering it his baby sister's Squirrel Teether Silicone Baby Gum Soother. It's a perfectly fine teether—it's mint green, made of food-grade silicone, and it occasionally keeps my six-month-old quiet for exactly eight minutes at a time. It’s cute and the little acorn detail is nice for sensory play, but honestly, it's just a piece of silicone, y'all. I had to explain to my son that wild animals don't want to gnaw on aesthetic nursery accessories.

If you're looking for the stuff I actually use for my kids when they aren't trying to adopt wildlife, you can browse Kianao's organic baby clothes collection here.

Why the disease panic is mostly overblown

The second I realized Jackson had been carrying this wild animal around like a football, my brain instantly went to rabies. I think every mom has that terrifying flash of worst-case scenarios when their kid touches something from the woods.

I completely panicked and called our pediatrician, who probably rolled her eyes at me, but she actually gave me some really reassuring news. She said that possums have a bizarrely low body temperature—somewhere around 94 degrees—which makes it almost impossible for the rabies virus to survive in their systems. From what she told me, it's incredibly rare for them to carry it.

They're, however, absolute magnets for fleas, mites, and weird intestinal parasites. So while you don't necessarily need to rush to the ER for rabies shots, you absolutely need to make sure your kids and your dogs stay far away from it, and whoever moves the baby into the box needs to be wearing thick gardening gloves.

When to just leave them alone

Before the wildlife lady even got to our house, she had me measure the possum by just eyeballing it against a ruler. I guess the magic number is seven inches. If the body (not counting the tail) is longer than seven inches, they're basically moody teenagers who are perfectly capable of surviving on their own and you should just leave them in the bushes.

By the time we handed our little rescue over, Jackson's Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit was covered in yard dirt and what I'm praying was just mud. I buy these specific onesies strictly because they're budget-friendly, the envelope shoulders make them easy to rip off a filthy child, and the organic cotton washes out easily without holding onto weird smells. That's literally the only thing I care about when my kids are treating the backyard like an unhinged petting zoo.

If you see one fall over and bare its teeth while smelling like actual death, it doesn't mean it has a disease. That whole "playing possum" thing is just an involuntary stress response to predators, and they can stay locked in that catatonic state for hours. Just walk away and let it wake up on its own.

Before you go scrubbing your kids down with industrial soap after their next backyard adventure, grab some of our gentle, chemical-free essentials to keep their skin safe.

Questions moms honestly ask about this

What should I feed a baby possum I found in my yard?
Literally nothing. Put down the milk, put down the cat food, and don't try to give it water through a syringe. Just put it in a dark, warm box and call a wildlife rehabilitator immediately before you accidentally drown it or destroy its digestive tract.

Can I get in trouble for keeping a possum as a pet?
Yeah, in almost every single US state it's highly illegal to keep native wildlife without a specialized rehab license. Plus, they require an insanely complex diet of whole prey and specific calcium ratios, so unless you want to blend up mice and insects in your kitchen blender, let the professionals handle it.

How do I keep the baby warm in the box?
You can take a heating pad, set it on the lowest setting, and put it under just one half of the cardboard box. This gives the animal room to crawl to the cooler side if it gets too hot. Just throw a smooth blanket over it—no loopy towels that will rip their little claws out.

Will a mother possum come back for her babies?
From what the experts told me, mother possums are basically moving constantly and they don't count their kids. If one falls off her back into the grass, she usually just keeps on walking and doesn't return to look for it, which is depressing but explains why we find so many orphans.

Should I be worried about rabies if my kid touched it?
My pediatrician assured me that their body temperature is too low to incubate the rabies virus in almost all cases. You still need to scrub your kid's hands aggressively with soap and water because of fleas and parasites, but you can probably cancel the panic attack about rabies.