It's Almost Always a Mistake

When will I learn not to take in adult wild animals?

But the man was so distressed. "I've known this squirrel all her life," he told me. "Five and a half years, and I knew her mother before her. In fact, her mother brought her up to me and introduced us as soon as the baby could get out of the nest."

This man has squirrel boxes hung on his trees. He knows every squirrel in his yard, individually, and they know him. He has names for each of them. He sets out food for them every day.

And now Twiggy was doing poorly. "She can hardly walk. She's getting weaker and weaker."

So after much discussion over a two-day period, I finally invited him to bring her here. "Just bring the whole box," I told him, "after you tape something over the entrance to seal it."

I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER.

We opened the box, very slowly, very carefully, to find a pink glob under her tail, a very, very newborn male.

The mother jumped out of the box and tried to escape out the kitchen door, which was closed, however. How we managed to catch her so easily I'm not sure, probably because she was still in labor (?) -- but in any case, catch her we did, at the expense of a bite to my thumb. (It's not severe, as I was wearning gloves, obviously inadequate ones.)

Now I've set the box inside a cage, hung a water bottle on the cage, put a bowl of food in there, and covered the whole with a crib sheet, to give the mother some privacy while the rest of her babies arrive.

I've reunited mother and baby, because the baby can't survive without at least some colostrum from her. And I'm hoping we haven't freaked her out enough to cause her to kill (and eat?) him and the other newborns as they emerge. And I'm hoping she herself won't die, as the nice man so fears.

There probably wasn't a thing wrong with her, she was just in the advanced stages of pregnancy. But I wouldn't know; I didn't examine her and am not going to, until tomorrow morning. I'm leaving her in peace meanwhile. I'm trying hard to resist the temptation to check on her every hour or so. Whatever happens will just have to happen. Some things you can't fix, and you stand a good chance of making them worse if you try.

New resolve: never take in an adult wild creature of any kind! Not even a bird with a broken wing. Ninety percent of them, once you've set the wing and it has healed, still can't fly again anyway. And you can't decide, "Okay, so I'll just keep it all its life," because the stress of being in captivity kills them within a few weeks.

No more adults, Anastasia, NO MORE ADULTS!