I've posted a few articles about Brooklyn wildlife here over the years.  Now I apparently have one of them as a roomate.

Last week I broke a tile on my bathroom vanity and decided that today was a good day to fix it.  I keep my spare tiles in a barely heated shed under my kitchen extension.

As soon as I opened the door to the shed and the gamey smell hit my nose I knew that something wild was living in there.  I assumed it was a feral cat or two until I saw a bunch of straw nesting material falling out of a large bag of potting soil.  Cats don't do that so I picked up a lawn torch, gentley opened the bag and look what I found.  Petey Possum!

I wasn't all that surprised by this because I see possums late at night at least once a week.  The dogs have become so accustomed to them that I can tell from their reaction when they've picked up the scent a hundred feet away.  They're fairly, uh, aromatic animals.

Not sure what to do here.  On the one hand, I'm not going to do what one of my neighbors did and kill him.  Any wild animal that manages to survive on the streets of Brooklyn has my profound respect.  My concern with the nesting material however is that this is really Penelope Possum and that she's about to bring more of these critters  into the world.  Whatever, I need to replace the missing brick in the side of the extension in the spring.

Local lore says that opossums took a foothold in Brooklyn about seven years ago when some genius at one of the Brooklyn community boards thought they would be an excellent solution to keeping the rat population in check.  They're very versatile animals and aren't shy about killing prey, including rats.  Problem is, that same versatility means that they're happy to live on the same garbage as rats.  So the rats survived, the possums survived and here we are.

Possums are fearsome looking animals but they're actually pretty passive towards larger animals, hence the "playing possum" thing.  I rummaged around in the extension for about five minutes looking for my tile and its only reaction was an occasional hiss.
 

If you're one of those homeowners who looks disapprovingly at renovations which destroy the period character of the building, you're gonna need a defebrilator after reading this story.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/18th-century-french-chateau-razed-by-mistake/2012/12/05/7765e3de-3ed9-11e2-8a5c-473797be602c_story.html

18th-century French chateau razed ‘by mistake’ by builders while owner was away

PARIS — Residents of a sleepy French village in Bordeaux have been left dumbfounded after discovering their local 18th-century chateau was completely bulldozed “by mistake.”

The mayor’s office in Yvrac said Wednesday that workers who were hired to renovate the grand 13,000-square-meter (140,000-square-foot) manor and raze a small building on the same estate in southwest France mixed them up.

“The Chateau de Bellevue was Yvrac’s pride and joy,” said former owner Juliette Marmie. “The whole village is in shock. How can this construction firm make such a mistake?”

Local media reported that the construction company misunderstood the renovation plans of the current owner, Russian businessman Dmitry Stroskin, to clean up the manor and restore it to its former baroque glory.

Stroskin was away when the calamity occurred and returned home to discover his chateau, a local treasure boasting a grand hall that could host some 200 people, as well as a sweeping stone staircase — was nothing but rubble.

“I’m in shock ...I understand the turmoil of the community,” local media quoted Stroskin as saying. He told them he plans to build an exact replica of lost manor on the site.


Another story here: http://rt.com/art-and-culture/news/chateau-bellevue-accidentally-destroyed-076/