Have You Ever Heard of Possum Pond in Endicott?

One spring day, while I was lying in bed waiting for my alarm to go off, my wife Chris had to go into work early that day so she walked out to get in her car. As she was getting into her car, she looked in our koi pond in our backyard and saw something grey. She went inside the garage to get the net to try and scoop it out. She realized it was too heavy for the net. She didn’t want to be late for work, so she got in her car and started driving to Kirkwood.

She just got out of the driveway when she called my cell phone and told me that there was something in the pond and that she wasn't sure what it was. I asked what it look like. She said it may be a kitten or something. So after I took a shower, I went out to look at the pond. Sure enough, there was a grey furry thing floating in the water. When I first saw it I wasn't sure what it was. I thought it might be one of our Halloween decorations and couldn't figure out how it ended up in the pond.

So I grabbed a shovel to try and get it out. It was very waterlogged and heavy and I struggled to get the grey furry thing out of the water without me falling into the pond. As I was trying to lift it up on the shovel, it rolled over and I saw its face. It was a possum. I used the shovel to throw it up on the rocks that surround our koi pond. He was too heavy to get the shovel underneath him without disturbing the rock's so I had to go to plan B.

I went down into my basement and got a pair of rubber gloves and went back outside. I picked the possum up by its tail and went to put it in a garbage bag. He, or she, was so waterlogged that its body drop down a little bit as I was holding on to its tail, and I thought the tail was going to break off in my hands. I put the possum in the garbage bag and threw the rubber gloves in with him then I ran inside to wash my hands. From that point on, our koi pond has been known as possum pond.

All types of animals stop at our pond to get a drink of water. In the winter, the pond freezes over except for a small area where we place a pond heater to keep the pond from freezing solid. If the pond freezes solid and the gases can't escape, it will kill the koi.

When the pond is covered in snow, you can see paw prints where animals have gone over by the heater to get some water out of the pond. The possum must have went to get a drink and fell through the ice and then either swam or floated under the thick part of the ice where we did not see him until the pond thawed and he came back to the surface.