A Bird in the Hand Goes Back to the Bush

Hello fellow Appalachia enthusiasts!

     The sun is out, the days are long, and spring is in the air! This is my favorite time of year for several reasons. The days are longer, and that little bit of extra sunlight makes me feel like a new person. Secondly, everything will soon be green again, and there are lots of flowers in my near future. My third reason for loving spring is also my favorite, which is BABY ANIMALS! I've been seeing baby squirrels scampering around campus, and I figured today would be a great day to share with you some of my baby animal rescue stories!

     If you've spent any amount of time in the rural regions of Appalachia (Nicholas County, WV, for me), then I know you know someone who is involved in the logging business. My Uncle Don was a timber cutter for most of his life, and my dad has been grading lumber for the last two decades. How does this tie into baby animals? Well, where there's woods, there's animals, and lots of them! (Grammatical transgressions were intentional there.) Pretty much 99.9999% of my rescues were obtained this way. Today, I'm going to fondly reminisce on the days of chasing around some rambunctious raccoons, a darling deer, and a buoyant baby bird!

     Let me just start with saying raccoons are my favorite animals to ever exist. If someone came up to me today with 20 raccoons that needed somewhere to stay, I would take every last one of them and probably lose the deposit on this apartment, but it would be worth it. I bought an antique raccoon piggy bank at an antique store last weekend, and it's the best thing I've ever bought.

But alas, this isn't a blog about piggy banks, and I seem to be completely off topic. Back to the baby animals! 

     I've had 6 raccoons in total, all products of the logging industry, but I'm going to tell you about the most recent litter. Raccoons like to build their nests in trees, where they keep a litter of 2-5 kits. When a tree has been cut and starts to fall, the mother jumps out (sadly, she usually gets killed in the fall), but the babies are usually still in the nest, unharmed but orphaned. This is where I come in.

     The three raccoons I'm going to tell you about were about 6 weeks old when they came into my life. I named them Ruby, Nona, and Winslow. Some kitten bottles and kitten formula worked quite well for them, however, I only had 2 hands, and 3 very hungry raccoons. I don't know if you've ever met a raccoon, but their disposition is a little less than courteous when they're hungry, and I spent most of feeding time breaking up a fight, because no one wanted to wait their turn. Thankfully, they were soon ready to try out some solid food, but that was a whole new ballgame. I decided to give them one of those big cans of glazed fruit, which they loved, but my raccoons were also glazed before the meal was finished. That meant bath-time. Have you ever bathed 3 crabby raccoons that were still fighting over a chunk of pineapple? It's not an easy process. 

Winslow. My Uncle Don is in the background.

     I took my raccoons everywhere with me. They like a small, dark place to sleep, and a bowling ball bag serves this purpose quite well. I kept their kitten bottles in the pockets on the side. I can't even describe the looks that people would give me when my bowling ball bag started chirping and occasionally snarling. (Siblings fight, you know?) They were quite cuddly...just not to each other when food was involved. 

     Soon after the arrival of my raucous raccoon trio, came Arthur, the deer. He was found on the road next to his dead mother, who had been hit by a log truck. Regular cow's milk in a regular bottle worked well for him. Before I knew it, anywhere I walked, I had a perfectly straight line behind me consisting of 3 raccoons and a fawn.

Family Portrait

  As the raccoons got bigger, they started wondering further and further away, and they eventually just returned to the wild. It was sad, but also wonderful, because that was the goal. The deer stuck around for a few years, where he roamed the neighborhood and got fat on snack cakes. He was very playful, kind of like a baby goat....if a baby goat had antlers and weighed 100+ pounds. He was very sweet and loving, and this would ultimately be his downfall. You can literally put an orange hunting vest on a deer, but that doesn't mean much to some people in Cabela's country. Some people just can't help but to eat their neighbor's pet. Let's not go in that direction. Let's just remember the sweetness and playfulness of Arthur the deer.

     

     I believe I also promised you a story about a baby bird. Every year, the pine trees in my parents' yard are overflowing with birds and their babies. A fledgling leaving the nest isn't really a huge deal, their mother will feed them, and they'll eventually figure out their wings. However, this was not an option for the little robin who ended up in my yard. At the time, we had a Boston Terrier, a killer of all things that encroached on her territory. I tried to return this bird to the tree. I nailed a butter-bowl to a tree, and I left the bird there nearly all day. No luck. So I brought it in, and made it a nest in the butter-bowl and spent the next two weeks of my life chopping up nightcrawlers into bite-size pieces. Its name was Milo, and rescuing a baby bird is quite an undertaking. The sun would start to rise, and Milo would start to chirp. I had to get out of bed, and start chopping up the nightcrawlers. Baby birds are hungry constantly, so I was chopping up worms and feeding it every hour until sundown.

     About a week after I took this bird in, it had actual feathers, not those bony pinfeathers. I, a flightless mammal, needed to teach Milo, a winged bird, how to fly. This was a problem, but the solution was quite simple. A mother bird pushes them out of the nest to make them fly, I just had to recreate that. I would take Milo to my grandma's house (away from cats and dogs), and taught my bird to fly. It started with sitting on the ground with her perched on my finger, and just quickly yanking my finger downward, instinctively making the bird flap its wings. I kept doing this, holding it up a little higher each time. Eventually, I could give it a little toss (from a sitting position), and it would take off. During the following week, I had a bird, flying around my room, following me from side-to-side. 

     This was early summer, and one day I decided to go to a friend's graduation. Whenever I left the house, I would put Milo in a hanging cage on the porch, so that it would be a little more familiar with the outdoors when it came time to return to the wild. While I was gone, my mother called to tell me there was a big robin feeding my little robin through the cage, and it was just freaking out. I returned home, locked up the dog, and opened Milo's cage. It initially flew onto the roof where the big robin was squawking, and they both flew back to the pine trees. Once again, I was very sad, but still happy that I had saved a bird and watched it fly back to the wild. It was a great day. 

    *If you find an injured or orphaned animal, I strongly encourage you to call a wildlife crisis center or your local DNR. Wild animals belong in the wild and should stay there if possible. Wild animals do not make good pets. The animals I rescued required constant attention, and I would not recommend it to someone that doesn't have the time or patience.  

Do you have any Appalachian wildlife stories? Have you ever found a rattlesnake in your sleeping bag or a possum on your porch? I'd love to hear about it at mountainbloodwv@gmail.com