Arrivals and departures

Let’s lead with some good news—Beaver Butt was transferred to rehabber Lorraine Conklin in South Georgia on May 24. While she doesn’t currently have any beaver kits, she does have two nonreleasable adult beavers who will teach him his needed social skills prior to his release next year, and she has a private pond with an established beaver population, mostly her former rehabs. Lorraine called Friday morning, May 25, to let me know Beaver Butt was settling in nicely and she had begun a very gradual process of introducing him to the nonreleasables.

Once again, let me stress that rehabbers don’t operate in a vacuum, and we don’t attempt to keep or rehab animals that are beyond our skill levels or our facility setup because they’re “cute” or to satisfy our egos. We maintain contact with each other on an as-needed basis so that we can arrange transfers like this one to place the animal where it will have the best chance at eventual release.  Lorraine has the ideal setup for rehabbing beavers AND she has other beavers; I have neither. Beaver Butt’s chances of release increased by 100% when Lorraine agreed to the transfer. THIS is what wildlife rehab is all about—cooperation to ensure the best outcome for the critters.

In other news (sounds like I’m CNN or something! Maybe WNN—Wildlife News Network), the baby birds keep coming in…

The finches are actually good to go but refuse to leave the flight pen. This isn’t unusual for finches; they’re slow to leave the security of a sure meal, even when they’re pretty close to totally self-feeding. The mourning dove is totally self-feeding but looks at me as if to say, “Are you crazy? It’s a scary world out there!” when I mention release. I tried for three days last week to convince these slowpokes it was time to go, but I never force the issue. I prefer what’s known as a soft release, where the bird can decide when it’s comfortable choosing freedom and can continue to come down for supplemental feedings until its skill level and confidence are at appropriate levels.

The sole surviving barn swallow is in the flight pen as of today. Because they eat on the wing, meaning they snap up insects and eat them while in flight, barn swallows must be nearly 100% self-feeding before release. This means she’ll be with me until she refuses food from me because she’s feeding herself. That could be tomorrow or two weeks from now; barn swallows in rehab are unpredictable when it comes to self-feeding.

The cat food drenched mocker from last week is close to flight-pen-ready, as is his new buddy, this gorgeous little catbird who came in this week. Catbirds and mockers are in the same family—note the similarity of their heads, beaks and body shapes.  But catbirds have a much more pleasant begging call, and they’re just generally sweeter birds. I like to call them the mocker’s more refined cousin. As adults they’re shyer than mockers and you’re less likely to see them, although you’ll often mistake their call for a cat meowing—hence their name.

The possums are making occasional early dusk appearances now, so I was able to get another shot of them for this week. How’d you like to pay the dental bill on those teeth? Possums have 52 teeth, more than any other North American mammal, yet they seldom bite. Their primary means of defense is to faint, or “play dead,” complete with emitting a foul odor and even drooling. It usually works and has led, of course, to the phrase “playing possum” to describe someone who’s faking illness, injury or sleep, or just being very still and quiet to avoid notice.

Several times a year, usually during breeding season, I have raccoons raid my bird feeders during the late afternoon. Normally, when a nocturnal animal is seen during the day, especially a known rabies vector species like coons, it’s not a good sign. But nursing mothers and sometimes newly independent juveniles will stage daytime raids out of sheer hunger.  I advise people to use caution in this situation; never approach the coon directly, and if the problem persists for more than a few days, stop putting out afternoon feedings for the birds and squirrels for a while. The coon will move on if there’s no food available. In addition to being a highly rabies-prone species, coons shed a particularly nasty roundworm called baylis, or raccoon roundworm, in their feces. Baylis is virtually impossible to eliminate, remaining on surfaces for impossibly long periods of time. A person who touches these surfaces can then become infected, and baylis invades the brain, causing blindness and death. I will grant you that coons are cute and highly intelligent, but they’re vermin-infested, rabies-prone and really nasty-tempered. This is truly a case of it being best to admire wildlife from a very long, safe distance.

This hatchling woodpecker was found on the ground with a neck wound. He also had a beak deformity, as you can see in the photos.  We don’t know the story behind his fall from the nest—did he actually fall or was he stolen from the nest by a predator and then dropped? Unfortunately, he didn’t make it, which is a shame. I wanted to see what species of woodpecker he’d turn out to be. My money was on red bellied.

This hit-by-car (HBC) box turtle escaped serious injury. The upper shell was chipped and the underside cracked—nothing that couldn’t be patched up so that after a few days’ meds and observation, he was releasable.

When LWR received a call about a HBC whippoorwill, I had to bite my tongue. Below the Fall Line in Georgia, we actually have chuck-will’s-widows, but everyone calls them whippoorwills. They’re actually slightly larger than a whippoorwill and their song is different, but they are in the same family: Goatsuckers, nocturnal birds who scoop up insects with a gaping maw of a mouth as they fly along at night. While his mouth isn’t fully open in the photo below, you can get an idea of just how different it is from a “regular” songbird’s mouth.

Fortunately, he was just concussed and was releasable after a couple of days of observation and hand-feeding. Because they eat on the wing, members of the Goatsucker family must be hand-fed in rehab, which is an added source of stress for the bird, so the sooner release can take place, the better for the bird’s overall wellbeing.

This nestling mockingbird is a classic example of why you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet. The person who found this bird called me the afternoon after she found the bird, telling me that she’d fed it the previous evening but then read on the ‘Net not to feed baby birds, so she hadn’t fed him anything…all day. I informed her that she had probably already starved the bird past recovery and she needed to try and get some food in him ASAP, before we met. It was too late; the poor mocker was breathing his last when I got him and was dead before I made it home with him.

Folks, I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it yet again: the information you read on the ‘Net concerning wildlife care too often isn’t so much “how to help orphaned wildlife” as it is “how to kill a wild baby in 24 hours or less.” There’s a reason I have no feeding instructions on my website and am vague about what I feed animals in my care. IF—and that’s a big “if”—you need to keep an animal overnight or through the next day before you can get it to me, I’ll explain over the phone what you need to do short-term. I do not give out long-term care instructions.

Contrast this tale with the story on these brown thrashers, who are still pre-fledglings. One of them hopped under the finder’s carport, and she assumed it was a fledgling and chained her dog to protect the bird. She watched it closely from the window to make sure nothing else bothered it. And then its sib showed up. And then a third sib. And then a fourth sib. She never saw parents at all and noticed that none of the birds could even flit short distances and they were desperate for food. She then scooped up all four pre-fledglings and called me. All this occurred within a four-hour window, so the birds were hungry but in good shape when I got them.

This is a textbook example of doing things right. She didn’t intervene at first other than to restrain her dog for the birds’ safety. She watched from a secluded area to see if the parents were feeding the birds. She did NOT attempt to feed them herself. She didn’t call half the neighborhood over to gawk and handle the birds. When all four sibs ended up unnested with no parents in sight, she rescued the birds and called me.  The result? One of the smaller thrashers has a leg injury, a result of hopping from the nest—these babies may look flight-worthy but they’re still flying like feathered bricks. Otherwise, they’re in great shape and as you can see, two are already perching.

I wish every animal LWR received was found by someone with this sort of all-too-uncommon common sense, and I wish I’d asked the finder’s permission to use her name, as she deserves public recognition for her level-headed, common-sense approach to the situation.  I don’t offer praise often or lightly, but this is a case where it’s truly justified.

And finally, the wood duckling is growing daily and getting more and more paranoid. Paranoia is a wood duck trait; because this little guy came in somewhat older than I usually get wood ducks, his paranoia is especially pronounced. I’ve had to resort to a screen in front of the tub to keep him from jumping out five seconds into his twice-daily swims, and God forbid I look at him; he peeps frantically and hides under his feather duster surrogate mama!