 Maxie in his nest The baby animals have started arriving at Wild Things! But before I start mentioning a bunch of new characters, I wanted to give a few updates on patients in this post.
As previously mentioned, Maxie made a very fine nest for himself in a watering can hanging on my house! I don't think this is his main nest, but he certainly uses it from time to time and it looks very cozy inside! He regularly comes by for snacks, as seen in the pictures below. He has become quite wild and just usually takes a nut and runs for it!
 Runty! Runty, seen here with his one snaggletooth hanging out, has had some dental work in the past two weeks. After his teeth and nasal sinuses started getting infected, he had all his incisors taken out. Ouch! Many thanks to Dr. Spindel of Animal Ark Veterinary Hospital in Baldwinsville, NY for performing this surgery.
The goal of wildlife rehabilitation is to return healed animals to the wild. However, sometimes, despite our best efforts, animals end up unreleasable, like Runty. Though some advocate for euthanizing all unreleasable animals, I believe in many cases they can be used as educational animals and can be given a good life with the proper housing, companionship (of their same species) and enrichment. This is my goal for Runt. His teeth were so screwy, and the vet found that both upper and lower jaws were a bit screwy as well, so it was for the best to have this operation performed. He still has his molars and in time he should learn to use them to eat nuts. For now he is happily slurping down delicious squirrel-shakes made out of nuts, veggies, applesauce, and other goodies! He is fighting some infection post-surgery, but is doing very well and is much more active than pre-surgery. Below are some pictures of him playing with a new toy: a pink octopus.
 me & Peter say goodbye
Peter finally was able to be released to the Wild Woods! He overwintered here while his injuries healed and was super strong and ready to go. Everyone will miss him :)
 Peter leaves WTS
And what else has been going on as winter turns to spring?
Many wild things have been using the Wild Things brush-piles built by volunteers in the Wild Woods (left), and all the squirrels came out in the early spring, despite the snow...
The turkeys have been visiting. And now that the snow has melted, they have been displaying and gobbling to all the little turkey hens. They are so handsome!
And, of course, LilMo, is back and is nursing her 2010 babies!
 LilMo grabs a peanut
 Goodmorning Peter! Goodmorning Peter!
This is how I find Peter most mornings. Somehow he finds a hole in his double layer bedding, crawls inside and uses it as a cozy sleeping bag!
Peter is doing really well. He is walking as if he didn't have a massively funkily-healed back leg, eating as if he still had all his canine teeth, and his tummy bed-sores are all healed as well (thank you Joshua for helping shave his belly!). Plus, after getting a bit chubby, he is down to 4.6kg from 5.5kg, so he's lost about 2lbs and is running around quite fast with his svelte new form! Below is a picture of him helping me prepare breakfast for all the Wild Things patients.
 Peter helps prepare breakfast for other patients
 Donation from HSUS 'Coats for Cubs' And look what else arrived at Wild Thing: a box full of donated fur pieces thanks to the Humane Society of the United State's Coats for Cubs program! Fur hats from 5th Avenue furriers, fur collars, stoles, and even a chain of Pine Martins linked together to be worn around the shoulders. These will be such a comfort to all the little babies soon to come to WTS this spring and summer. A big thank you to all who donate to this program!
 Max's home
I found where Max the squirrel has made his home... in this watering can hanging from the side of my house (I stuck it up there for the winter)! I'm so proud of his innovation and he has stuffed it full of all the toilet paper I gave him (see posts below), and other cozy things that he has come across. I was wondering how he always appeared so soon after I open the back doors...I thought he might be living in the drainpipe, but no, the watering can! :)
He still comes by for breakfast as well (see picture below).
In other news, Runty is doing well. Tomorrow I am going to try to cut his teeth after trying a new sedative. Stay tuned....
 Help yourself to cashews Maxie!
Winter can be a tough time for all the squirrels as there is a lot of snow in the ground and it can be hard to get and find all your nuts! Even harder if you were released late in the season and weren't able to store any nuts for the winter, like Bright Eyes, Tough Stuff & Little Girl. So here are a few updates to show you how well they are doing!
 Here is ToughStuff! With a cashew. He is doing great!
Above is a picture of LittleGirl contemplating the snow. I don't see very much of her, and was very worried, but she appears to have turned up again. Female squirrels seem to disappear for a while and then reappear. Perhaps females are the sex that disperse, I don't know. Perhaps she found better squirrel feeders?! What is always amazing to me is how the little squirrels can be full of playtime one day and the next day they are wild and serious and being sqwerlz! Below is a picture of her playing with a stuffed toy before she was released- she is having so much fun!!
BrightEyes is also doing great (pictures on left). He & ToughStuff usually turn up together. They often fight over nuts, but there is plenty to go around!
And Lil'Mo is also doing fantastically! I see her usually at least once a day and she is very polite coming to say hello and ask for a nut. Below is a recent picture of her- hasn't she grown!! The person who found her wanted her to have a life as a wild squirrel, and she sure does ...with a few trips back for yummies!
Lil'Mo, ToughStuff & LittleGirl are easy to spot because of their dark reddish colouring, BrightEyes is easy to spot because he has such classic colouring, with a super white belly and a sweet, sweet face! Plus the little ones have had funny looking tails as they grow into their winter thickness!
By the way, you will all be pleased to hear that the Angry Young Man opossum, featured in the last blog, has gained almost ONE POUND in the last 2 weeks- that is about 30% of his original WTS body weight (i.e., he came in at 3.4 lbs and now about 4.5lb!)!! WOWEE. As soon as it gets warmer he is outta here!
And Ophelia, the little Screech Owl written up a few posts ago, has been sent to another rehabilitator with big flight cages (one day I hope WTS will have some!), where she will be tested with live prey (mice) to see if she can hunt on her own. I appears that she will never be able to see out of her left eye, but her right eye may have some vision- only time & testing will tell. If she shows us she can hunt, she is good to go, if not, I will try to find her a permanent home.
 Not everyone is a happy patient at Wild Things. Despite being rescued as a starving and very small (probably born late in the season) Virginia Opossum and being given a second chance to survive and make it in the world, this little guy is definitely NOT a happy patient!
He will bite and thrash every time I have to pick him up, and his favourite defence mechanism is explosive very stinky diarrhea. He also sticks out his "bifurcated," or forked, penis at me. This is a special anatomical trait of opossums. It is interesting to see, but I'd be just as happy if he kept it to himself! ;)
Opossums also have their scrotum located in FRONT of their "forks," so it really is a unique set-up!
WTS has also seen lots of "snowbirds" or Dark Eyed Juncos visiting. I love these little birds as they are always the first out in the harshest of winter snows (see the one on the feeder below?!). There is one that has a strange marking- it looks like he has a white collar around his neck. This is the 3rd year I have seen him- he has been here ever since I moved in! The juncos stay around WTS in the summer as well, though many of their brethren have different winter and summer areas.
WTS also has quite a few White Tailed Deer visiting. The group below comes almost everyday and appears to be made up of one baby, two young does and an older doe- perhaps a mother and her 3 daughters. No sign of Andre Button this year so far.
And who have we here?? A little Eastern cottontail. It may actually be Silver Blaze, who if you remember was released here last year and stayed around for months enjoying the WTS woods. It is incredible to see this little bunny outside on the coldest nights of the year. How it manages to survive and find food I have no idea. I feel a mixture of pride for its success and fear for its vulnerability...but by all accounts it appears to be doing great!
 Things have been busy at WTS over the holidays!
Meet Ophelia, a young Eastern Screech Owl. Ophelia was hit by a truck shortly before Christmas and if it wasn't for the quick action of her rescuers who took her off the road and kept her safe & warm & called WTS, she might not have survived . Amazingly no bones were broken, but she sustained injuries to both eyes. This is a common injury in Screech Owls when they collide with objects. She has been on various anti-inflammatory medication and eye-drops with the hope that they will recover. Many species of owls, such as Screech owls, rely so much on their hearing when they hunt that even with the loss of an eye they are still able to be released and hunt successfully.
 She was clearly doing well on her own and was nice and plump and very strong. She arrived here still with evidence of a recently eaten meal- so she was probably hit mid-hunt.
But as you can see in this picture to the left, when she arrived, her eyes were very sore and she was keeping them closed. But they are doing so much better as you can see in the above picture, but she does NOT like her eye drops (below)!
And this is a young male Virginia Opossum. He was brought to another rehabilitator but came to me so the vets could take a look at him at Cornell. He too had been hit by a car and sustained injuries to one eye (a corneal ulcer) which will probably leave him blind in that eye. He also had some intestinal issues similar to hemorrhoids, but is now well on his way to recovery. He is very gentle and loves to sleep all day in his blanket...but at night he is super active.
And when I get a good picture of Jose teh blind squirrel, another car victim who came to WTS at the end of 2008, I will post that too.
Biut for now we are all sending you a big Happy New Year and many great wishes for 2009!!
 The time has come to tell the story of Mister H. Lecter, a 4 month old Virginia Opossum. He's about 4oz, or 110g. Lecter arrived about 10 days ago. He was disorientated, possibly due to an imbalance of calcium, to which opossums are prone. Lecter is adorable, and as with all opossums has crazy strong grasping hands that give him the ability to climb anything, and therein lies his tale of multiple escapes and various acts of troublemaking.
For the first few days I thought, how cute! He loves to climb in my hair! But being a still a bit wobbly, I had no idea what he was really capable of...
A few days after his arrival I received 5 more baby opossums, these are about 3 1/2 months old (NB: as with all marsupials, opossums are born much earlier in development than placental mammals- those animals who are nourished by a placenta in the womb- which means that a 3month old opossum is about equal in development to a newborn placental mammal.) Well, the next day I went to feed the new arrivals at 6am and the cozy lump in their hideyhole was much bigger- here's why...
That's Lecter- the bigger opossum in the box above, and you can see him with the little ones to the left. He had escaped, I have no idea how, from his cage and snuck into the babies cage next door. So adorable! So I set up a bigger cage for all of them. What was great was that the little ones started figuring out how to eat solids by following his lead.
Well, the next day, that little Houdini had done it again...
So after this escape I secured the cage even more...
And, what do you know? He was gone once again the next morning! Not only gone, but there was plenty of evidence that he had been very active around WTS (I've got to get this darned room finished to eliminate all the fun hiding places for little runaways!). However, I was confident that he would come out when he was hungry. Several days passed, and I thought that he may well have found a hole in the wall through to the outside.
I actually wasn't too worried as amazingly opossums are usually on their own by Lecter's age, though I did want to keep him for observation and until he was about 2lbs to give him more of a chance outside.
Day by day passed. And one afternoon when I was feeding the little ones, that funny hissing gasping opossum call suddenly started...it was Lecter, and here's where I found him (see below)- in the bin.
Little Lecter is now in "jail"- a big bird cage! I've separated him from the babies as I've since learned that opossums will cannibalize other opossums if they get a craving for their much needed calcium & protein. Oh my! I wonder if he was just fattening up the babies for a little midnight snack...!
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