Opossums do dig, but they are not the powerhouse excavators many homeowners assume. The Virginia opossum, the only marsupial native to North America and the animal most people in the United States and Canada mean when they say “possum,” scratches shallow, small holes in lawns and garden beds while hunting for food at night. These are foraging pits, not burrows. Understanding what drives the behavior makes it much easier to stop.
What Opossum Digging Actually Looks Like
If you walk outside in the morning and find small, scattered divots in your lawn or mulch beds, an opossum may be responsible. The holes are typically shallow, rarely deeper than a couple of inches, and roughly cone-shaped. They tend to appear in loose, moist soil or freshly watered turf, where grubs and earthworms are close to the surface. You will almost never find a long tunnel, a deep burrow entrance, or a mound of excavated dirt. Opossums simply lack the anatomy for that kind of heavy earthmoving. Their claws are modest compared to dedicated diggers, and their forelimbs are built more for climbing and grasping than for sustained digging.
The damage often looks random, with holes scattered across the yard rather than concentrated in one spot. That scattershot pattern reflects how opossums forage: they wander slowly across the ground, nose down, sniffing for invertebrates just below the surface, then scratch down to grab whatever they find. A single opossum can leave a dozen or more small holes in one night, which makes the damage look worse than it is. Each individual hole is minor, but a yard full of them feels like something tore through the place.
Why They Dig
The short explanation is food. Opossums are opportunistic omnivores with broad appetites, and the insects, grubs, worms, and larvae living in soil are a significant part of their diet. When a lawn has a healthy population of beetle grubs, especially the white grubs of Japanese beetles or June bugs, opossums will return night after night to take advantage of the easy meal. Moist conditions after rain or irrigation push grubs closer to the surface, which is why digging damage often appears to spike after a good watering or a wet spell.
Fallen fruit is another draw. If you have a fruit tree dropping apples, pears, or persimmons, opossums will dig around and beneath the tree looking for both the fruit itself and the insects that congregate on rotting produce. Compost piles, improperly secured trash, and outdoor pet food bowls can also pull opossums into a yard, and once they are there, they will forage the lawn on their way to or from the main attraction.
Opossums do not dig to create dens. This is a common misconception. They are not burrowing animals and will not excavate a hole under your porch, shed, or deck the way a groundhog or a skunk would. Instead, they are opportunistic shelter-seekers. They move into existing cavities: a gap under a deck, a hollow log, an abandoned burrow dug by another animal, a brush pile, or even an attic accessed through a gap in the soffit. If you find a large hole or tunnel entrance on your property, an opossum may be using it, but it almost certainly did not create it.
Telling Opossum Damage Apart From Other Yard Diggers
Several common backyard animals dig in lawns, and knowing which one you are dealing with changes the approach. Opossum holes are small and shallow with no soil mound. Skunk damage tends to look similar in size but is often described as small, round plugs of turf pulled up or flipped back, because skunks push their snout into the ground to reach grubs. Raccoon foraging damage is usually more destructive: raccoons have stronger forelimbs and will tear up larger patches of sod, sometimes peeling back whole sections of turf to get at grubs underneath.
Armadillos, in the southern half of the United States, leave holes that look somewhat like opossum holes but tend to be a bit deeper and more numerous. If you live in armadillo territory, the volume of holes is usually the giveaway; armadillos can create dozens of holes in a single night concentrated in one area. Moles and voles leave raised tunnels or surface ridges rather than open holes, which is an entirely different kind of damage.
Because opossums are nocturnal, you rarely catch them in the act. The best way to confirm which animal is visiting is to look for tracks. Opossum tracks are distinctive: the hind foot has an opposable thumb that sticks out at a wide angle, producing a print that looks almost like a tiny human hand with a thumb pointing sideways. If you find that track pattern near the damaged areas, you have your culprit. A trail camera pointed at the yard for a night or two can also settle the question quickly.
How to Stop Opossums From Digging Up Your Yard
The most effective strategy targets the food source rather than the opossum itself. If grubs are drawing opossums to your lawn, reducing the grub population removes the reason they visit. Beneficial nematodes, applied to the lawn in late summer or early fall, parasitize grub larvae in the soil and can substantially reduce their numbers over a season or two. Milky spore is another biological control that targets Japanese beetle grubs specifically and builds up in the soil over time. Chemical grub treatments containing active ingredients like chlorantraniliprole are also effective and are typically applied in spring or early summer before grubs reach peak size.
Removing other food attractants helps too. Practical steps include:
- Pet food: Bring bowls indoors before dark. Opossums quickly learn the schedule if food is left out at night.
- Fallen fruit: Pick up fruit from the ground daily, especially once it starts to soften and ferment.
- Trash cans: Use cans with secure, locking lids. Bungee cords across the top work in a pinch.
- Compost: Use an enclosed bin rather than an open pile, and avoid adding meat scraps or dairy.
- Bird feeders: Clean up spilled seed beneath feeders regularly, or bring feeders in at dusk.
Motion-activated deterrents can make your yard less inviting. A motion-activated sprinkler that triggers when an animal crosses its sensor is one of the more reliable options. The sudden burst of water startles the opossum and makes the area feel unsafe. Motion-activated lights and ultrasonic devices are marketed for the same purpose, though results with those tend to be inconsistent; some opossums habituate to lights quickly, and the evidence on ultrasonic repellers is thin for most wildlife species.
Fencing works for defined areas like garden beds and vegetable patches. A fence does not need to be tall to keep opossums out of a garden. They are decent climbers, so a short fence alone will not do much. But a low fence topped with a floppy, outward-angled extension made of mesh or chicken wire is surprisingly effective, because the opossum cannot get a grip on the wobbly material as it tries to climb over. Electric fence strands set a few inches off the ground around garden perimeters are another option that many wildlife management guides recommend for persistent visitors.
When Opossums Move in Under Structures
Because opossums do not dig their own burrows, the concern with structures like decks, porches, sheds, and crawl spaces is not that the animal will excavate a den but that it will exploit an existing gap. Opossums are remarkably flexible and can squeeze through openings that look too small for an animal their size. A gap of three or four inches along the base of a deck is more than enough.
If an opossum has already taken up residence under a structure, the first step is to confirm it is actually there and that there are no young in the den. Opossums breed in late winter through spring, and a female may have a pouch full of developing young or older juveniles riding on her back. Sealing an entrance while young are inside creates a much worse problem. Wait until you are confident the animal has left, typically at night when opossums leave to forage, and then close the opening with hardware cloth or galvanized steel mesh secured to the structure. One-way exclusion doors, which let the animal leave but prevent re-entry, are available from wildlife supply companies and are useful when you are not sure of the animal’s schedule.
Once the opossum is excluded, secure every potential entry point around the structure. Opossums are not particularly persistent the way raccoons can be; if the easy access is gone, they usually move along without putting up a fight.
The Case for Tolerating Opossums
Before going to war, it is worth considering what opossums are doing for you while they dig. Their appetite for grubs, beetles, slugs, snails, and other garden pests means they are performing a form of pest control while they forage. An opossum rooting through your lawn is eating the same grubs that, left unchecked, would damage the turf from below by feeding on grass roots. In that sense, the cosmetic holes an opossum leaves may be a better outcome than the brown, dead patches a heavy grub infestation produces.
Opossums also eat ticks. This fact became widely publicized after a frequently cited estimate suggested that a single opossum could consume thousands of ticks per season. More recent field research has questioned how many ticks opossums actually encounter and eat in natural conditions versus controlled laboratory settings, and the real number is likely lower and more variable than the popular claim implies. Still, opossums groom themselves thoroughly and do consume ticks they find on their bodies, which contributes at least modestly to tick reduction in areas where both opossums and ticks are present.
They also eat carrion, venomous snakes, and overripe fruit that would otherwise attract yellow jackets and other stinging insects. For many homeowners, the tradeoff is reasonable: a few shallow holes in the lawn in exchange for a free, nocturnal exterminator that handles some genuinely unpleasant pests.
Health and Safety Concerns Around Opossum Activity
A common worry is rabies. Opossums are actually far less likely to carry rabies than raccoons, skunks, foxes, or bats. Their body temperature is lower than that of most placental mammals, which is thought to make it harder for the rabies virus to thrive in their system. Encountering a hissing, drooling opossum does not mean you are looking at a rabid animal; opossums frequently bare their teeth and drool as a defensive display, and they are famous for “playing dead” when severely threatened.
That said, opossums are not entirely without disease risk. Research has identified them as potential reservoirs for several tick-borne pathogens that affect humans, including the agents responsible for ehrlichiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, babesiosis, and Lyme disease.1Ticks and Tick-borne Diseases. Are Virginia opossums really ecological traps for ticks? Groundtruthing laboratory observations The risk here is indirect: opossums can carry infected ticks into your yard and potentially shed pathogens into the environment. They can also carry leptospirosis and certain intestinal parasites. These risks are shared with many other wildlife species that visit suburban yards, including raccoons, deer, and feral cats, so they are not unique to opossums. But if opossums are regularly foraging in areas where children play on the ground or where pets spend time, it is worth factoring that into your decision about how aggressively to deter them.
Opossum feces can carry the parasite that causes equine protozoal myeloencephalitis, a serious neurological disease in horses. If you keep horses and opossums are foraging near feed storage or hay, excluding them from those areas is more urgent than it would be for a typical suburban lawn.
Repellents, Trapping, and What Usually Does Not Work
The market for wildlife repellents is enormous, and most of the products sold for opossum control have little reliable evidence behind them. Mothballs are sometimes recommended in older advice columns, but they are a regulated pesticide and using them outdoors in an unapproved manner is both illegal in many jurisdictions and ineffective. The naphthalene in mothballs dissipates quickly in open air and does not maintain a concentration high enough to repel wildlife. Ammonia-soaked rags, cayenne pepper sprinkled on the lawn, and predator urine granules all show up in home-remedy guides, and all share the same problem: they may work for a night or two before the opossum figures out there is no actual threat.
Trapping and relocating opossums is legal in some areas and regulated or prohibited in others, so check local wildlife laws before setting a live trap. Even where it is legal, relocation is generally a poor long-term strategy. A relocated opossum faces high mortality in unfamiliar territory, and the vacancy you create in your yard is quickly filled by another opossum moving in from the surrounding area. Habitat modification, meaning removing food sources and sealing entry points, is far more durable because it changes the conditions that attracted the animal in the first place rather than removing one individual from an ongoing situation.
If you hire a wildlife control company, ask specifically what methods they use and whether they focus on exclusion and habitat modification or primarily on trapping. Companies that emphasize exclusion tend to produce longer-lasting results. A company that traps and removes the animal without addressing why it was there will often see you calling back within weeks.
Seasonal Patterns of Opossum Digging
Opossum digging tends to be most noticeable in late summer and fall, when grub populations in lawns peak. Beetle larvae that hatched earlier in the summer are reaching their largest size and feeding heavily on grass roots just below the surface, which makes them both easy to find and worth the effort for foraging opossums. This is also the season when lawns show the most visible damage from grubs even without opossum activity, so the combination of grub damage below and opossum holes above can make a lawn look rough in a hurry.
Spring brings a second, smaller wave of digging activity. Grubs that overwintered in the soil begin feeding again as the ground warms, and opossums that made it through winter are hungry and nursing young. Breeding season runs roughly from January through July in most of the opossum’s range, with females potentially producing two litters per year. A nursing female needs significantly more calories than usual, which makes her a more aggressive forager and increases the chance she will dig up a lawn repeatedly.
Winter digging is less common simply because opossums slow down in cold weather. They do not hibernate, but they become less active during freezing stretches and may stay in their den for several days at a time. In southern states where winters are mild, opossum activity and the associated digging can be a year-round issue without much seasonal break.