Just Another Day

Today was a busy day in Wildlife Rehab-Land. I started out, as usual, by feeding everyone. This includes the "usual characters" (my dog, two cats, and Baker the blind Grey Squirrel and Bella the Southern Flying Squirrel).
Grey Squirrels
In addition, I have four orphaned Grey Squirrels who, thankfully, are finally weaned and eating solid food and drinking from a water bottle attached to their cage. They all came to me as eyes closed babies, between 1 and 3 weeks of age. They are now around 10 - 11 weeks old and are ready for an outside cage. Unfortunately, I can't transfer them to the 4 X 4 X 2 foot cage that was custom made for squirrels, because the last group last year ate a hole in the wooden roof (half inch plywood) and released themselves in my backyard. I'll repair the roof sometime this week if I get a chance. There is a sheltered area with a shelf they can climb on and an open area with hardware cloth (hard wire grid with 1/4 inch openings) secured with wood trim. The whole thing is on stilts and sits over English Ivy (so I don't worry about cleaning what they drop!). I usually add some long branches so they can practice their climbing skills and also eat the bark (part of the Grey Squirrel's natural diet). I also attach a wooden nest box to the wooden side so that, when it's time for release, I can catch them. I wait until after dark, when they are all in the nest box, and I go out and use a staple gun to cover the entrance hole with hardware cloth. Then I can remove the screws holding the box to the wall and take it to the release site the next morning. It usually works pretty well, but last year's crew even managed to remove the roof from the box! I clearly have some work to do (why didn't I take care of this in the winter, when I didn't have any squirrels?).
Eastern Cottontail
I also have a juvenile/young adult Eastern Cottontail rabbit who was caught by a cat and received injuries to its front leg and one ear. It is at the precarious age where it desperately needs freedom. Many cottontails die on the planned day of release simply because the stress of captivity causes them to have a heart attack (it's called "capture myopathy", and I've written of it here before). Its injuries were healing well, so I had to make a judgement call: keep it so I can give it the antibiotics it desperately needs but risk losing it due to stress, or let it go and risk it dying of septicemia (a blood infection). I decided to keep it for the minimum five days of antibiotic therapy. I have a little trick for keeping cottontails who are older and thus prone to stress and in need of a lot of space to run around: I keep them in my bathtub! I have a guest bathroom with a tub that has sliding glass doors. So I can put down plastic garbage bags covered with newspaper, and put a hiding box in there and the rabbit can run around but it can't get out and my cats can't get in (I do have another bathroom where I bathe!) The bunnies have all the room and privacy they need, and I have an enclosure that is easy to clean! People laugh at me, but hey, it works. I didn't feed the cottontail this morning because they are nocturnal and usually eat in the early evening. I let my back yard grow wild so around dusk I go out and fill a bucket with wild clover, dandelion greens, plantain, and wild strawberries. I supplement this with timothy hay and alfalfa and, of course, water (but not from my tap - too many chemicals. I use bottled water). One small cottontail can eat a huge amount of food. They are turning plant calories into meat calories, and are heavily preyed upon by all the carnivores in the wild. They not only eat a lot, but they , um, defecate huge amounts, too. But it's not good to clean out their cage too early in the morning because they practice coprophagy. In other words, they actually have to eat their morning scat (i.e., "poop") in order to receive adequate nutrition. You know I'm not making this up! If I weren't superstitious, I would say that I will release this cottontail tomorrow, once it has had its last dose of antibiotic. But I'm not saying that. Because with cottontails, you never know.
Mourning Dove
I took in a mourning dove that had been injured by a cat on April 1. She had some bruising and lacerations to her lower abdomen and under one wing, and was missing all of her tail feathers. Whenever a wildlife rehabber takes in an animal that was found in the jaws of a cat or even in the close proximity of a cat, we always treat them with antibiotics. Cats harbor a bacteria called Pseudomonas in their mouths and it can be quite infectious and quickly lethal. I also know from personal experience that the infection is very painful. So antibiotics are a must. As for the missing tail feathers, many birds drop all of their tail feathers when grabbed by a predator, whether it's a cat, dog, human or something else. This often enables them to escape, leaving the predator behind holding nothing but feathers. Unfortunately, it also renders the bird unable to fly for any great distance. A bird without tail feathers is held until the feathers grow back in. The time involved varies with the species and the time of year. For this little dove, it was fairly quick. She has been able to fly around my flight pen with no problem (the pen is 8 to 10 feet high, 8 feet deep, and 16 feet long). My dog kept her flying around, just by running by the pen occasionally, so her flight muscles stayed in condition. This morning, I decided the time had come for release. I took my dog inside and opened the pen's door and flushed her out. She soared into my neighbor's yard and to the highest branch of their highest tree, about 60 feet up. She's going to be just fine. And my day was off to an excellent start.
A Ride in the Country
I had been unsure if the dove would leave the yard so quickly, so I had made arrangements to take my dog and go visit a friend who lives in the country about 35 miles from me. Sue is also a wildlife rehabber and she has four dogs and 3 cats, so she was happy to let me bring Stella, my dog. Stella loves car rides! She played with Sue's dogs while I went and visited with her non-releasable wildlfe - an adult Virginia Opossum, a red-phase Eastern Screech Owl, and 3 Eastern Box Turtles. Also, I checked in on the chicken pen to see the two non-releasable Pigeons, one Cotornix Quail, and various chickens (Brahman, Polish, and Red). Two chickens and one pigeon had even laid eggs!
More Eastern Cottontails
This morning, Sue had taken in a litter of six baby bunnies, weighing between 36 and 46 grams each. Their eyes are still closed and they must be tube fed with a very narrow diameter tube (3.5 french, for those of you familiar with such things). A cat had brought one into a woman's house and she had followed the cat back out to the nest, where she rescued the remaining five. She took the injured bunny to her vet, who gave it antibiotics and stitched it's wound in the groin area above the right leg. Then they called Sue, whose name they got from someone who knew someone who knew someone. Sue adores opossums, so I take her most of the baby opossums I take in. But, like many rehabbers, she's afraid of baby cottontails because of their tendency to die at the drop of a hat. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment, because I love cottontails. There is really nothing more exquisite than a baby cottontail, trust me! So I brought home and am now the caregiver for six baby cottontails (Eye-yi-yi). For today they are only getting rehydration fluids. Even though they came into rehab not long after their dawn feeding from their mother, the stress of handling left them a bit dehydrated. More importantly, giving them food right away could cause a condition known as "bloat", which cottontails are prone to and which is very often fatal. So I first flush their systems using rehydration fluids and then I always add a little bit of Bene-bac (a powdered product with beneficial bacteria) to their formula. I have no illusions that all six babies will survive, but I know they would never survive in the wild without their mother and with cats lurking around. I'll just do the best I can.
Birds
Sue had taken in a fledgling House Finch that someone found in a horse barn. When baby birds first leave the nest they usually can't fly and appear quite helpless. But the parents are always around to care for them. When well-meaning people find these fledglings, they assume they have been abandoned and pick them up. This is the worst thing they can do, but it happens daily this time of year. The "rescuer" called a local vet who tried to convince them that the bird would be much better off left where it was, being cared for by its parents. But the person would have none of this and brought the bird to the vet, who called Sue. It wasn't clear whether this bird would/could feed itself, or whether the parents were still "spoon-feeding" it. So home it came with me. I force fed it when darkness fell outside and turned out the lights. It will be up and cheeping for food at dawn. But that's tomorrow.
While I was at Sue's, a neighbor from down the road dropped by to say there was a small bird on her screen porch, having been brought in by one of her dogs, and it didn't seem able to fly. So we set off down the road to have a look at it. It turned out to be a Hairy Woodpecker, a beautiful black and white bird about the size of a sparrow. It was fairly easy to catch and didn't seem able to fly, but I couldn't detect any broken bones or evidence of spinal injury. It was also "BARF", or Bright,Alert, Responsive, and Feisty. It kept trying to peck at my fingers (always a good sign!). I thought that it had most likely flown into the screen of the porch and been stunned. Then, while on the ground, it was found by the dog who brought it in. Often a bird needs a half hour or so to recover from hitting a screen or a window (providing there was no serious injury). So I told the woman we would take it back to Sue's and observe it for an hour or so and bring it back if it regained the ability to fly. I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a kangaroo pocket so I tucked it in there because darkness is usually calming to a bird. I kept my hand loosely cupped around it. Sue and I got in the car and I went to put on my seatbelt, which meant I had to let to of the bird in my pocket for a few seconds. And out it flew! So here we are driving down the road with me climbing over the seat to get to the back of the car (so graceful!). The back seats of the SUV were down, and the bird was on the carpet between the driver's side seat and the door. So I reached for it and... poof! It was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, we were very close to Sue's so she pulled into the carport and we started searching. And searching. And searching. We found a lot of things - among them three umbrellas ("So that's where all my umbrellas are", said Sue) and an open bag of very old Ritz crackers ("Were you keeping these for some reason?" I asked), and even a knit winter hat that, when I shook it, produced a twenty dollar bill! Lots and lots of things. But no bird. Because the weather was nice (lower 70's, or about 22C) and the car was in the shade, we decided to go inside and let the bird have some time to come out of wherever it was hiding. About 25 minutes later, I went back out (this time with a flashlight/torch) and saw that one of Sue's cats was sitting on top of the car, as if guarding the prisoner. Soon after starting the search again, I found the little bird on a tiny ledge under the glove box. It had most likely been very amused watching these two crazy women tear the car apart looking for it. We took it out to an empty pen in Sue's back yard (doesn't everyone have animal pens in their back yards?) and watched it until it was quite clear that it could fly just fine. So we took it back down the road (this time I kept it in my pocket and didn't let go of it for an instant - Sue fastened my seat belt for me) and told the neighbor that it seemed to have made a full recovery. We didn't actually mention the "adventure" it had. Then we walked behind her house to a ridge overlooking a low pasture with woods all around and I let it go. It flew to the highest tree and never looked back. Sometimes, they get better on their own, despite anything we do. Fortunately, we managed not to do much harm.

So now I've just got one more tubing of the bunnies and then I'll go off to dream of... if I'm lucky I'll dream of flying free, like the dove and the woodpecker and, if all goes well, the finch.