A highly unusual — and four-legged — suspect was apprehended on Thursday in Juneau.
Tim Travis works at N C Machinery near the airport. Late Thursday morning, while headed out for their lunch break, he and his coworkers discovered an opossum roaming about outside their shop.
“I was inside the shop, and one of my co-workers comes running in and goes, ‘You have the number for animal control, we have an opossum.’ And I said, ‘No way. We don’t have opossums in Alaska,” he said. “He’s like, ‘Well, there’s an opossum outside.’”
And sure enough, he was right. Opossums are not native to Alaska and don’t live in the state. But somehow, this one made its way all the way to Juneau. They are considered an invasive species.
Travis said, upon detection, the opossum attempted to evade the scene and scurried into a shed, where it hid under a pallet. His coworker promptly named him Chester.
“We had only had Chester here for like, maybe 10 to 15 minutes. And he’s like, ‘I’m gonna name, Chester.’ I’m like, ‘okay, Chester, it is,’” he said, laughing.
Travis said he and some coworkers spent their lunch break working with Juneau Animal Control to wrangle him into a carrier. They delivered him to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game office in Douglas.
Stephanie Samaniego is a wildlife biologist and orphan animal coordinator with Fish and Game. She said the department arranged to relocate Chester to the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage. He flew out on Friday afternoon.
Samaniego said she isn’t exactly sure how Chester arrived in Juneau, but suspects he probably was barged in on accident inside a shipping container. She said invasive species can have detrimental impacts on the native environments they inhabit, so it was crucial to find Chester a new and more appropriate destination.
And she said this isn’t the state’s first opossum rodeo.
“They can bring in diseases that native species haven’t been exposed to. They can create competition for resources, and they can even use native species as prey,” she said. “But knowing that we had dealt with an opossum in the past, we knew our way forward, I guess you could say.”
Chester’s arrival mirrors a similar story of another opossum that hitchhiked to Homer in a shipping container from Washington in 2023.
That female opossum, named Grubby, quickly became a social media icon after evading capture and remaining on the lam from officials for weeks. She was eventually taken into custody by the Homer Police Department, but not before first biting an officer on the hand.
She became a resident at the Alaska Zoo and lived there until her death from old age last fall.
Travis said he wishes Juneau’s opossum well and hopes his name remains Chester.