Four and a half years ago, an opossum, Didelphis virginiana, the only marsupial of North America, gave birth to a litter of joeys under the shed in the backyard of my father’s house. It was six months after he died.

Here’s a playlist of videos of the opossum mother, whom I called Shakuntula, and her offspring from

August of 2020:

There’s remarkable footage there of Shakuntula facing off and driving away a big, fat raccoon. Not playing dead. Rare confrontation. And there are videos of five joeys in August of 2020. The first male is known in the videos as Primo, but should have been called Bharat. It exited and wandered on its own before the others.

Marsupials are pre-placental mammals. They are older than us by a hundred million years. Their little hands – with opposable thumbs! – existed before our hands by tens of millions of years.

Pre-placental Mammals

The platypus is a monotreme, older still, lays eggs.

The marsupials evolved to grow their babies in a pouch on their bodies, still do. The placenta was an evolutionary advancement allowing us mammals to grow them in a pouch inside our bodies.

MAY 2021

In May of 2021, I filmed an opossum, returned. The dark legs and fair body seemed familiar. But I cannot be sure. Size-wise, is this right for a ten-month old opossum? If so, it’d be Shakuntula’s offspring.

Is this a female? Shakuntula’s daughter?

APRIL 2025

It’s four years later, and ten days ago, I discovered a joey wandering around the yard. I set up cameras again and lo, and behold, another litter of opossum under the shed.

I think the mother is one of Shakuntula’s, perhaps the one that returned above, and that these are Shakuntula’s grandjoeys.

Compare the little, white-faced, dark-legged opossum joey in the 2020 and ’21 videos to this one.

I believe that video shows the mother, whom we will call Och, the Mayan word for opossum, (pronounced ‘awch’) checking out the fruit plate and leaving the area to hunt or gather nutrients.

Och then returns to the plate, eats the banana, then goes into the burrow to nurse the as-yet unweaned young. She comes out, cleans herself off (including her front, where her teats are) before eating the remaining fruit.

That was April 10, 2025. I saw one of the joeys at least a day before I set up that camera, wandering and lost in the backyard. The one I believe to be the first male of this litter. I decided to feed and film them.

Possum Mukbang

Mukbang is a broadcast genre (originally from South Korea) for video, especially one that is live-streamed, that features people eating an abundance of food and addressing the audience.

In the USA opossums are colloquially known as ‘possums.’

Since I began feeding the mother opossum and have started filming the very first bites taken by her young, I call these videos Possum Mukbang:

I will be filming the joeys as they grow over the next 100 days, and go from not being able to eat solid food to having 50 teeth, most of any mammal.

This will be Possum Mukbang 2025.

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