Basil the Opossum Has One Eye, a Big Heart, and a Job to Do
The National Zoo’s newest resident isn’t colorful or exotic. That’s exactly the point.
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This week was a bittersweet one at the zoo. Visitors to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, with their panda-patterned hats and panda umbrellas, flooded in to say farewell to the zoo’s three giant pandas, who will soon be on their way back to China. To honor their departure, zoo staff are hosting a multiday Panda Palooza, with panda-themed movie screenings, kids’ activities, and cake for the bears. After all, the pandas have been D.C. icons since the first generation arrived more than 50 years ago. Today, zoo-adjacent restaurants sell panda pancakes and panda cake pops. The D.C. metro system sells panda tote bags, and the Washington Mystics women’s basketball team adopted Pax the Panda as its mascot.
But I went to the zoo last week to see a very different animal. I arrived at the Small Mammal House, walked past the South American prehensile-tailed porcupines and a pair of Australian brush-tailed bettongs, and found Basil the opossum asleep, his fuzzy body curled into a ball, his chest rising and falling. When Mimi Nowlin, a Small Mammal House keeper, climbed through a door into the back of his enclosure carrying a plastic tub of capelin, the creature’s eye—he has only one—fluttered open. He stood up on tiny legs. And as Nowlin held out a chunk of fish with a pair of silver tongs, Basil waddled forward, opened his toothy mouth, and chomped. A few minutes later, after the tub was empty, Basil shoved his head in and licked the sides. He had bewitched me, body and soul!
When I read last month that the National Zoo was acquiring a Virginia opossum, I squealed at my laptop and punched the air. Opossums are nature’s ugly-cute superheroes, as I’ve written before; they eat bugs and trash, and they’re strangely immune to snake venom.
But then, a question began to gnaw at me. The Virginia opossum, America’s only marsupial, isn’t endangered or even rare. It isn’t exotic, like the wrinkly African elephants and the snarling big cats that we’ve come to expect from zoos. To most Americans, opossums are backyard animals. Wild ones probably prowl around the National Zoo grounds at night, given that they make their burrows in the park nearby. So why, I wondered, would a zoo put one on display?
Basil spent his early life in the wild—presumably the wilds of Washington, D.C. He was only a few months old in May when someone dropped him off at City Wildlife rehabilitation center. Puncture wounds covered his back, and his left eyeball had been pierced by a tooth or a claw—a cat attack, staffers guessed. After a few weeks of treatment, Sarah Sirica, City Wildlife’s staff veterinarian and clinic director, performed a surgery to remove the eye.
City Wildlife usually attempts to return rehabilitated animals to nature, but Basil couldn’t go back for two reasons. First, opossums already have terrible eyesight, and with just one eye, his chances of survival in the wild would be low. The second reason was that Basil was simply too friendly to make it on the mean streets of D.C. “We want them to be wild, reactive, and aloof,” Sirica told me. But Basil “was just a little quiet guy.” He didn’t even seem to mind being held.
These situations are difficult for rehab facilities: They can’t keep every unreleasable animal, so they typically euthanize them. Fortunately, Sirica had heard that the National Zoo was looking for an opossum, so Basil was spared, and spent a few weeks recovering in Sirica’s office. He’d poke his head out when Sirica brought him food, and a student trainee sometimes held him like a burrito in a fluffy towel.
Zoos have not historically been in the business of acquiring injured opossums. They began, instead, as menageries: lush gardens of colorful animals maintained by kings and aristocrats to demonstrate status, political power, and imperial might. The Tower of London had one in the Middle Ages. So did Montezuma and King Louis XIV of France.
The zoo as we know it—established for the purpose of science, not royal entertainment—did not exist until the early 19th century, when the Zoological Society of London opened an exotic-animal collection for private study in Regent’s Park. In 1847, it was opened to the public. Other cities, including Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., soon followed suit with their own public zoos. By the end of the 1800s, every city in the world had or wanted to have a public zoo, says Nigel Rothfels, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and the author of Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. A city’s animal collection, like an opera house or an art museum, became part of its identity.
Back then, Rothfels told me, zoos were understood to provide three main things: recreation, education, and opportunities for science. It wasn’t until the 20th century that a fourth goal was added: As species began disappearing around us, zoos became sites of conservation. The Cincinnati Zoo, for example, spent years attempting to save the passenger pigeon until the last one died there in 1914.
Zoos in the 20th century were thought of as arks, Rothfels said: “You had two of everything.” Zoos have been instrumental in replenishing the populations of the American bison, golden lion tamarins, and black-footed ferrets.
But lately, a new trend—a fifth mission—has taken hold in American zoos: getting people excited about the animals that live among them. It’s a little like shopping local, but for animal interactions. Modern zoos present “animals in the context of their roles in nature, and increasingly, nowadays, that really includes local fauna and flora,” Dan Ashe, the president of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, told me. Zoos are shifting, in other words, from a collection mentality to an appreciation mentality.
For the zoo experts and historians I spoke with, the rise of the backyard animal is a really exciting development. Elephants and rhinoceroses are fascinating creatures, but “we are so far divorced from the ecosystems those animals live in that it can be difficult to remember that even your backyard is an ecosystem,” Mason Fidino, an ecologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute, told me. Zoos showing off backyard animals, he said, are encouraging people to find compassion for species they might not otherwise think much about.
You can see the shift happening in zoos across the country. In 2018, the Oakland Zoo unveiled California Trail, an exhibit featuring black bears and condors. The Houston Zoo did the same in 2019 with a wetlands exhibit of bald eagles and alligators. In 2016, Zoo Miami opened a $33 million exhibit called “Florida: Mission Everglades” full of the panthers, wading birds, and alligators that populate the state’s national parklands. Vernon Kisling, a historian and a former animal curator at Zoo Miami, told me that he’d suggested a similar idea back in 1979 but his bosses weren’t interested. He’s thrilled at the recent shift. “To evolve the way they have,” he told me, “it’s really tremendous.”
Despite their evolution, zoos are still, fundamentally, places where animals are kept in captivity. Plenty of people dislike them for this fact alone. And the argument against caging animals feels stronger when you could see the same animal in a park nearby. But zoos offer the chance to get close to an animal that is habituated to humans, John Fraser, a conservation psychologist and the director of mission impact at the Alaska SeaLife Center, told me—to smell it, hear it, and observe its behavior over time. “It’s not that you simply see animals,” he said. “It’s that you understand them.”
Basil still needs some time to adjust to his new living quarters. But in a few months, he’ll be able to serve as an animal ambassador, as Sirica imagined. He’ll probably participate regularly in what the zoo calls “Keeper Chats,” where visitors will come to watch him eat breakfast while Nowlin strokes his ears. They’ll be able to get closer to Basil than to other zoo residents, such as tigers and lowland gorillas. And they’ll learn about the wonders of the Virginia opossum: that they eat ticks, carrion, and all sorts of other pests and gross things; that they get very cold in the winter because of their hairless tail and toes. Nowlin is eager to answer visitors’ questions, to tell them what to do if they see an opossum on the side of the road or snuffling through their trash.
Come December, saying goodbye to the zoo’s three remaining giant pandas—Tian Tian, Mei Xiang, and Xiao Qi Ji—will be difficult for Washingtonians. The animals have been a symbol of the zoo, and, by extension, the city, for decades. But the loss is also an opportunity for other animals to get a little bit of the spotlight. Maybe now D.C. residents will suggest that tourists pay a visit to a certain one-eyed opossum with a moving backstory. He’s a sweet little guy, we can tell them. And he’s ours.