Wildlife-Rehab

Last night, I realized that K had quite a few baby animals around the house and that I hadn’t posted any pictures. So, without further ado, may I present the cute ones: The first picture is of a young opossum. He and his siblings were in one of our outdoor enclosures, but he didn’t seem to be doing too well, so he’s back inside for a bit. The next set is a group of baby (week old) snapping turtles - note the remnants of the yolk sack. This is sort of an interesting story. The old non-profit had a snapper that died. However, we knew that the turtle had eggs. So we sent the body over to the vet school’s turtle team where they extracted and incubated her eggs until they hatched in August. These are the her babies. ...

I managed to get into the office a bit early this morning, which meant that I also got to leave a bit early (working as a federal contractor definitely has its perks). The only reason I mention this is because I beat K to the mail and when I reached into the mailbox, there was a rather thick envelope with the non-profit’s name (C/O me). It was from the IRS. Well, the only thing that we have out-standing with the feds is our non-profit status. So, I was a bit nervous in opening it. It felt a bit like opening a college application letter. I was really hoping that, like with the college letter, a thick envelop was a good sign. After all, if you’ve been turned down, they send you a one page letter. If you’ve been accepted, they send you a packet of information. ...

Yes, because I’m a mighty industrialist (aka Ubermensch) and the world will fall down if I stop writing. ;-) Okay, enough picking on the Randians. Sorry for the radio silence. A quick update: I got back from Des Moines last month and the next day had a board meeting for the non-profit I work with. As treasurer, I went to review the financial situation based on the projections we finally received. Sure enough, the detailed projections were in line with the back-of-a-napkin ones that I had presented earlier, i.e., dire. The only real solution was to close a significant portion of our operations, which we did. Unfortunately, that was also the part of operations that K cares most about. ...

They may take our rehabilitation bins, but they’ll never take… our FREEDOM! On Sunday, K release some baby water turtles that she had been over-wintering. Fortunately, we’re all of a mile from a good place at which to release turtles, Jordan Lake, so we didn’t have to drive too far. The big one in the image set is a male (note the long nails for better, um, gripping) slider and the other three are painted turtles (you can see the orange on the underside of the shells in the images in the gallery). ...

It’s okay to look, I promise that there are no shots of me doing naked cage construction. *shudder* A couple of months ago, K got a call about a squirrel. When the folks brought it over, it turned out to be rather small, but pretty far along in its development. Well, that’s because it was a flying squirrel. They tend to be a lot smaller, a lot sweeter and just darn cute. Because they live in colonies, K found someone with another flying squirrel and has been raising them together. They just recently went outside, so hopefully they’ll be releasable before winter. Here are some of the pictures from when they were still inside. ...

About a year and a half ago (November 2006), the wildlife clinic K volunteers with transfered a water turtle (yellow bellied slider) to her. A cute little guy, just over 7 grams and about the size of a quarter. Yesterday, weighing in at 125 g and with a shell about 4 inches long, we released her into the nearby lake. It’s easy to fall for a lot of the animals K rehabs. Their cute and tiny or just plain helpless and on the mend, but the turtles are particularly hard because K keeps them for so long. The following are a handful of the pictures we’ve taken of the turtle: ...

When it rains it pours. A month into spring and K hadn’t received any calls about rehabilitating animals until today when she got two. The first was about baby bunnies. K doesn’t take baby rabbits because too many of the stories end with “and then they died. For example, “I was rehabbing some bunnies in the spare room, the dogs barked, the rabbits got scared and then they died; or “I successfully rehabbed the bunnies, but they got stressed out while I was releasing them, they stroked out and then they died. You get the idea. The other call was for a litter of opossums whose mother had died. She took those. ...

Back in August I wrote about a rehab possum that K was taking care of – she was very much a cutie. I was looking through some pictures on the camera and realized that I had a few more of her. Now that she’s all grown up and has been released, I thought folks might like to see them: Here she was back in August: A month later, in September: ...

you are my mommy Three or four weeks ago, K received a call about a baby possum. It seemed that the mother had died and the finders could only locate this one baby. They brought it to the house and K’s been raising it ever since. Apparently, she’s doing a good job. She (the possum, not K) started off at 23g and is now around 80g. The picture above is her clinging to K while sleeping. Note, this is not good rehab practice, but an individual baby possum is a lonely animal. Fortunately, the possum should “re-wild as it grows up. ...

So K’s possums got a big brother recently: The whole family. Note the little sores on the small one? That’s where their whiskers are coming in. Here’s the biggest one by himself. He needs a bit more enrichment, so he gets to hang out with us on occassion. I didn’t quite capture the possum tongue, but he was licking me. Very cute 🙂