Sorry this is a little late, but I thought I could share how I feed my opacum, who is very shy.
First I sift through the leaf litter and look under the cork bark pieces to find the salamander. Most of the time I find her this way, but sometime she digs into the dirt and is not easy to find. If I don't locate her with the casual looking, I don't go digging deeper as in my experience if I have to root her out, she won't eat. But if I do find her, I drop a wriggly piece of worm directly in front of her face, cover her back up with leaves, turn off the lights and walk away. After a half hour or so I check back to make sure the worm is gone and it always is. She is so shy she has never eaten in my presence in the 4 years I have had her, but has remained plump with this method. I also drop in wild wild caught potato bugs/ rolly pollies from my garden. I do think there is some risk to this, though - I don't use chemicals in my garden but I am sure my neighbors do, so I recently got a culture of isopods and as soon as I have a good size colony I will no longer use the wild caught ones.
And I have not tried this but want to - I have a really good culture of white worms right now and have noticed that they (the white worms) really like to hang out in decomposing leaves (for whatever reason, I topped off my white worm cultures with rotting leaves. The worms love them!) My plan is to separate some white worms into a container of just rotting leaves and let them multiply for a few weeks, and then place the whole culture, leaves and all, in the opacum habitat. I don't know how successful this will be but am curious so will try it anyway. I hope I end up with a wriggling ball of white worms, sans dirt!
Anyway, hope this helps and that your opacums are eating well for you!
HJ
