Every town has one animal that owns the night-time garbage, and here it is the opossum. Grey, pointy faced, with a long bare tail, moving with a slightly drunk shuffle from bin to bin.
Where you’ll see it
Gardens, roofs, roadsides and anywhere with rubbish, all night, all year. Sadly also on the road, where they are slow to move.
What to know
Costa Rica’s largest marsupial and a thoroughly useful one, cleaning up fruit, insects, carrion and cockroaches. When cornered it opens a mouth full of teeth and hisses, which is entirely bluff, and if that does not work it collapses and appears to die, which is the origin of playing possum. It gets up again when you leave. Latch the bins and the relationship is a happy one.
