Saying goodbye can be tough. This is a picture of me & Habakkuk, a Virginia opossum, the day before his release. Habby came to me with 6 brothers & sisters on 1July and weighed 40g (~1.5oz), they were about 10-13 weeks old. When he was released the other day he was almost 2 kilos (4.4lbs)!

The reason why Habby ended up staying longer than his siblings is because one of them bit off the tip of his tail back in July (opossums tend to bite at almost anything- I still have a healing finger after about a month!). It was healing just fine, but then got terribly infected and had to be amputated. You can see the little tail stub in this picture. It finally healed up nicely, and amazingly enough he still uses it to hook onto things!

WTS has also released lots of little squirrels over the past 2 weeks. Here is a picture of one of the little Red squirrels that is now running around the WTS woods. Reds are a HANDFUL! They are so high energy and if they come in past a certain age (~6 weeks or so) they do not like to be handled. But they are very cute! I just welcomed another one yesterday. He is still very young and likes to be held, which makes looking after him a lot easier.

OK, this isn't the greatest photograph, but you can just about make out 5 very cute little Grey squirrel faces all cozy in the hammock in their release cage. These 4 brothers & 1 sister were raised by another local rehabilitator and brought to WTS to be released here in the woods. They are now running around and living in the woods full time...but still stop by for breakfast! it's a great time to release squirrels as the woods are loaded with acorns. Yum! Below is a picture of a couple of them just after I opened their cage and they went out to explore. The other 3 are up the tree!

And it's not just the WTS patients that have been busy. Below are a few pictures of some of the other residents in the area. In the last few days I've also seen a young Yellow spotted salamander and an opossum (perhaps one of the ones I released several weeks ago as it was about the same size as Habby), and this morning there was a Cooper's hawk sitting on top of the bunny release cage. I can just imagine it saying  "OK little bunny, let's be friends once you get out...."! He was beautiful but I scared him away! At this time of year there are many juvinille raptors about that have realised that hunting on one's own is tough and they are happy to find easy meals!

Virginia Opossums may only live for 2 years, which means they need to grow up fast! Females are reproductively mature by 6 months, and males by 8 months. Mister H. Lecter is a great example of this. Just take a look at how fast he has grown! He came in about 6 weeks ago just 100g and is now over 600g and will be released soon. Go Lecter! (didn't necessarily want to put in all those half-asleep pictures of ME, but it DOES offer a scale!)

In addition to special formula, though he is now weaned, the opossums at WTS receive quite delectable dishes of fresh fruit, kitten chow soaked in apple juice, dry kitten & ferret food, fresh veggies, eggs (both raw & hard boiled), and mouse. Just take a look at what came by post the other day- 250 frozen weanling (i.e., weaned but young- which have the perfect balance of protein & calcium) mice.

A big thank you to all those who have made donations, as it is almost 75cents/mouse (shipping included) and I go through about 10/day- that adds up fast!! And, btw, cutting up mice for opossum dinners, is maybe one of the worst jobs at WTS. :( But the opossums love them, and so goes the circle of life :)

And just to end on a slightly more palatable note- palatable to humans at any rate... here's a cute picture of the male Downy woodpecker feeding his begging son at my feeder. Poor Pops looked bedraggled, and his son looked so fluffy and chubby. What a good dad! 

Busy times at Wild Things! This is a picture of a beautiful little White Tailed deer fawn that arrived a couple of days ago. A big thank you to Tammy & Katie who drive her about an hour and a half to WTS. In most cases fawns should be left where they are found- their mother may leave them in the same place for up to 24 hours while she is off feeding, or trying to lead a predator away. It is often hard to convince the public of this when they find one of these lovely creatures! However, Tammy & Katie knew that there was something wrong with this little gal. She was found in the middle of a road and looking disorientated. On arrival it was clear that she had some kind of head trauma, as her eyes were rolling around and she had continuous head rotations. Her eyes also looked cloudy. I brought her up to the vet clinic (seen here in the car), and they too are perplexed. Her symptoms indicate head trauma, but there are no bodily signs that she was hit by anything or suffered injury. She also appears to have bilateral cataracts- very strange to be seen in one so young. If these were birth defects it is unlikely that she would have lived for her whole 3 weeks (that's about how old she is), so what is it? Toxin ingestion? Illness?? Stay tuned!

WTS also welcomed a litter of Shrews. These little ones are TINY- about 10g each, and need to be fed every 2-3 hours...inlcuding during the night! They still have their eyes closed, and I'd say they are about a week old. A local gradaute student, Steven, rescued them, and did a great job! Their mother had nested in a compost heap, and it was disturbed by a gardener needing some compost. Steven did a really great job looking after them overnight until he found WTS. He also cleaned a wound that one of them had suffered.

I have to say, these little guys may be the toughest creatures I have ever had to feed! Below is a picture of the litter- see how small they are in comparison to the cereal next to them!

What else is going on at WTS? Well, LilMo's teeth are coming in (See picture taken while asleep), and 5 of the bunnies from the bunny colony are now in a big outdoor release cage, hopefully ready to go in a few days. Chippy the chipmunk is also doing great after being caught by a cat...twice...and may be ready to release soon too. I just got a call from the clinic with more patients, so stay tuned for more news! In the meantime, here are a few pictures of some local colour!

Today I need to talk about mice. Mice get a hard rap, but they're kinda awesome and really cute! AND amazing survivors- pretty smart little ones! To the left is a picture of M. Curieux, who I caught in 2006 and spent about a month in this mouse palace until he chewed through and escaped. And below is a picture of Chunk, so called because my very first night in the house I left out some very pricey dark chocolates, and in the morning he had run off with every single one of them, leaving he package behind.

Chunk had a broken tail, but got along just fine. He was also caught and spent all winter in this aquarium until I released him in the spring. I think he moved right back in, but I like to think that it taught him a lesson. In fact, I had a couple in the aquarium all winter, and during that time, I had no trouble with mice stealing food, and a year later I still don't- so I'm sure it taught them a lesson...well, unless I leave dark chocolates out- like the dark Hershey's kisses a few months ago- in which case they are all gone by the next morning! But can you really blame them??!

I know that I have quite a population living in my house, but they really don't bother me, and it's rather amusing to find their stores of bird food in random places in the house. The other night I was kept up all night by the strangest and kinda scarey noise. I didn't get up to check it out as I was tired, it was downstairs, and it was kind of spooky! The next monring I was making breakfast and heard it again, coming from an almost empty bag of squirrel food in the kitchen. This is what I found (below). He had been jumping against the side of the bag all night trying to get out. Bless his little heart! I took him out and he promptly ran across the kitchen and disappeared into some place that only the mice know about. He was pretty darned cute and very soft and silky. He has a laceration behind his ear, but it looked all healed up. It is not unusual for wildlife rehabbers to rehab mice and to end up with twice as many as when they started! All of these mice so far are Deer mice.

 
Now for a strange mouse tail... several weeks ago, when I arrived back from NYC, I sadly found a little baby mouse who had gotten in my bathtub and couldn't get out. He ended up dying there. He was very small. I don't think that he was a deer mouse- he was very gray and had no brown to his coat at all. I was about to go bury him outdoors, but I thought I would try an experiment. Many animals will remove their dead. Some canabilize them, others just remove them and put them somewhere else. I thought that especially because this mouse was so little, he might have a mother out there, or something like that. So I placed him in an area where I know mice come and go, right near a mouse hole.

Well, the next day he was gone! He had been taken away. I assumed that he had been taken and eaten. But the really strange thing was that there were so many little mice footprints all around hte back of my house, which I had never seen before. So, my parsimonious theory is, of course, that there was a mouse burial. See, this kind of cleaver thinking got me into 2 top grad schools! But you know, maybe there really was! Has anyone really robustly studied wild US mice in the wild??