You may assume at least one of these two animals is a diehard herbivore, but this video by BDN Contributor Allie Ladd shows its diet is more flexible.
Snowshoe hares are thought to be strict herbivores. We can picture them in our mind’s eye, quietly munching away in a clover patch.
They also eat dandelions, grass, new growth on woody plants, twigs and bark from gray birch, red maple, apple, aspen, choke cherry and black cherry, and shrubs and vines such as blackberry, willow, black alder and high-bush blueberry, according to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.
But maybe some winters are tougher than others for foraging because this hare is eating from a dead moose carcass. Ladd’s camera captured the hare nibbling away at the free meat.
The Virginia opossum, Maine’s only marsupial, eats a lot of insects, worms, frogs, plants and seeds. But they also will eat roadkill or take advantage of other opportunities for a free meal, according to the DIF&W.
Opossums are not fast-moving creatures like snowshoe hares and it makes them more vulnerable to becoming roadkill when they are looking for animals that have already succumbed to that fate, the department said.
But for now, this opossum is safe in the western Maine woods, eating a free meal.
