Our babies are growing up and more keep coming.  Our large influx of baby squirrels last month finally receded and now we are getting only a few bit by bit of the older babies who aren’t quite ready to be on their own.  Although these “teenage” squirrels don’t need formula feedings, they present their own challenges.  They are wilder and terrified of being handled so there is a real risk of being bitten.  We also now have raccoon babies and foxes, and the baby birds are just starting to trickle in. 

Sadly, we lost most of the bunnies we received, many of them because they had been without mom for too long and others due to injuries and stress.  Bunnies need specialized care so we are “grooming” several of our new rehabilitators for that specialization.  The more rehabilitators we can train, the more we can all start to specialize in the species we care for.  This really helps the animals because we can tailor our cages for one or two species rather than rearranging the same cage each time we get in a different species.  We can also concentrate our training and develop “species experts”.  We expect to have at least four new rehabilitators licensed in the next month or so, actually doubling our current group!

Right now I have a 4 week old gray fox who was left homeless when the abandoned building her family chose for their den was demolished.  All four of her siblings were crushed and her parents ran off terrified.  She is doing well but is very lonely so Saturday I will ship her off across the state to a rehabilitator who has a non-releasable adult gray fox so that she can have a “role model”.  We do our best to avoid raising any babies alone.  They really need siblings to learn how to interact and communicate with their own species.  The playing they do prepares them for hunting. 

About a week after I received her I got another call about a baby fox who had been picked up at the side of the road and kept in the finder’s home for a week.  I was hopeful for a match for my little girl but this one turned out to be a red fox and much older.  They both occupied cages in my basement for a few weeks until the weather got warm enough to get them into outside cages.  Then I got a third fox call, a red who had been hit by a car and was exhibiting neural symptoms.  We always have to be concerned with rabies when neural symptoms present but given the history of head trauma we were hopeful she would come around, and she did.  Only four days after being hit she was moving about normally and eating on her own.  And best yet, she was a perfect match for my other red.  The two of them are now housed in a large outdoor cage anxiously awaiting release.

For those who read my last column, Dracula, Houdini and White Feather were released.  I did lose my little burn victim bunny after a week.  We will be at the July 6 & 7 Bolton Landing Emergency Squad Arts & Crafts Festival at Town Hall with our table display.  Please come visit us in person and on the web at  northcountrywildcare.org.