This Opossum had me fooled at first! I was hoping to see Mink when I scouted out this area, and when I first spotted this dark figure scampering across the rock just before nightfall I though I had hit pay dirt.
No such luck though. At the time I took my photographs it was too dark to determine with certainty what type of animal this was. But processing the pictures in Photoshop revealed that we were dealing with an Opossum here.
I saw this same Opossum again and again over the next couple of evenings. In fact, this Opossum was very set in his ways and kept to a predictable routine. He made his appearance at roughly the same time (7:30 pm) every evening, and headed into the woods following the same route each time.
The little marsupial likely had a den some deep inside the rock pile and would come out each day at dusk to forage in the nearby woods.