Meet the Blue Bandicoot

Greetings Scrawlspacers (both of you).

I've launched a new blog called Blue Bandicoot.  You can find it here:  http://bluebandicoot.blogspot.com/

The thinking is that I can leave the Bandicoot open to webcrawlers, which Scrawlspace is not.  This blog is public, but off the grid for the search engines because of its very personal nature in places.  On the Bandicoot, I can start fresh, rather than having to go back through and purge ancient entries of information about myself or other people I might not want the world to be able to search on Google. Its possible for someone to stumble across Scrawlspace, but not to find it when searching say... natural history museums.

Scrawlspace is not dead, but it will remain more private. For now I'm going to focus more on Blue Bandicoot.

Wildcare week two

I volunteered for the second time at Wildcare today. Bob and I hosted a party for several of his colleagues and grad students last night, and it was a late night with plenty of booze, so it was not easy to get up this morning and motivate myself to get dressed and go clean cages, but I'm glad I did. 

As luck would have it, a little bluebird flew into my windshield just about half a mile from the Wildcare entrance. It swooped across the road right in front of me and hit a glancing blow that left it flapping on the road, so I turned around and picked it up, poor little thing.  Such a beautiful little bird!  I expect he will recover, he was doing much better by the time I left for the day.  I suppose if you've got to hit a bird with your car, doing so on the way to the wildlife rehabilitation center is the way to do it.

This stint was much a repeat of the last one.  I cleaned cages,washed bowls,  filled water dishes... but this time I got to help feed the baby birds.  I got a syringe full of bird chow, and went around poking it into the wide open mouths  of some 30 or 40 little birds.  It is surprisingly gratifying, just feeding something that is so very very hungry! 



Some of my charges.  Five hungry baby starlings.

 

We had several bird escapes.  I left a cage open once and three fledgling starlings escaped.  A pair of finches flew the coop, quite literally, and had to be rounded back up.  It's fairly easy to catch them, because they will come begging for food when you get the syringe out.  Some of the starlings that had gotten loose in the outdoor enclosure would fly over and land right on my hands, begging for food as I was making my rounds.  They would perch on the edge of the food dish and gape at me every time I refilled the syringe.  I called them the screamers because they make so much noise when you come around to feed them, it makes your head ring.

A troublesome pair of squirrels,
 just before their escape

The most excitement, however, was the squirrel escape.  There were two very lively little fellows who insisted on hanging on the doors of their cage as I was trying to clean it.  As soon as I cracked the door open a bit, they were trying to nose their way out, and while I was poking one back in, his partner escaped.  There was a fairly interesting 10 minutes or so in which my partner and I ran around with nets and gloves, trying to corral him back into the cage.  Then once he was netted, he managed to weasle his way out of the net and we had the whole thing to do over again. 

My favorites are still the little Opossums.  There's one in particular that comes to investigate me .  I while I'm cleaning his cage.  I brought my camera today so I could get some better pictures, (with mixed results) and he was mighty curious about that, and when I had to put my head  into the cage to scrub the far back corner, he nosed right up to my face, checking me out.

Curious baby opossum checks out my camera.

Finally, when all the cages were cleaned and wheeled outside for some fresh air and sunshine, I got to go look around a bit in the baby room:  this is where hundreds of tiny baby mammals are housed, many of them in incubators, and fed every 3 to 4 hours.  The girls working there told me that they have more than 90 Opossum babies alone. Just 'possums!  I peeked into one incubator and saw the world's most adorable, tiny baby skunks.  I like working with the birds, but I hope someday to be able to feed the little mammals, too.

They don't all make it, of course. Two little birds died in their cages this morning. But so many more survive than would otherwise because of Rondi and her amazing operation. It was well worth getting up and giving a few hours of my time -- even with a hangover -- to help out.

As I w as leaving, Rondi asked me if I would take a pair of gulls out to the lake and release them, so I had the pleasure of getting to see a couple of our charges return to the wild. I shot a little video of the release, and felt good all the way home.

That Darn Dog

It's not Roxy this time... it's Kobi.

I can not keep Kobi in the yard. I put her out the back door when I'm leaving for work and BOOM, she gets to the front porch before I do.  She makes this funny little whimpering sound right before she climbs over the fence, so I can hear her escaping, even as I'm locking the back door.  It's so frustrating, because I know what's coming next...

The chase. 

View of my rearview mirror, with Kobi in hot pursuit.

This used to be cute, but it's escalating into a problem I'm not sure what to do about.  Once  Kobi is out, she's impossible to call or to catch.  I don't even bother trying to corral her because I know she's not coming to me and if I try to catch her I run the risk of just chasing her further away.  When it doesn't matter if she's home right away, I just forget about it and wait for her to turn up on the front porch, or even to climb back over the fence and let herself into the garage.  But when she's out and I need to leave the house, it's a whole different story.

At first I could get in the car and call her and she would jump right in, thinking she was going for a ride.  Then she got wise to that and I had to actually start to back out of the driveway before she would come.  Finally I was reduced to cruising up and down the street with her running behind my car, stopping every few minutes to try to coax her in. But that is taking longer every day, as she is hip to the game and only gets close enough to taunt me before darting off again. 

Sometimes I get frustrated enough to just gun it and leave her in the dust.  Eventually she will quit chasing and go home.  But sometimes she follows me all the way to the main cross street, and I know from experience that she will not hesitate to chase my car out into traffic (she once crossed four lanes of morning traffic to follow me).  So if I can't shake her within half a block, I have to turn around and start over.

This morning I left her standing in the middle of the street when I went to work.  There was a work-crew across from our house that was cutting limbs out of the power lines, and she was a little shy of passing their big, noisy equipment.  But by the time I'd come home for lunch, however... she had gotten over all that.

When I tried to leave, she chased me all the way to the busy cross street, whereupon I turned around and headed back the way I'd come.  We proceeded – her chasing, me stopping every 20 yards or so – back down the street, past our house and all the way to the cross street on the opposite end of the block.  Still no luck.  So I turned around and returned to the house, planning on getting out and hoping she would be fooled into thinking I was "just getting home" and run to me. 

No such luck.  Finally, I resigned myself to just gunning it and leaving her in the street again, so I got in and started to back out my car. 

By this time, the tree crew is cracking up completely.  Can't say that I blame them... it is evident who's in charge here.   As I pulled out this last time, one of the men stopped his work and crossed the street, calling and sweet-talking Kobi, trying to entice her.  I rolled down my window and told him, thanks for the effort, but there was no way he was going to be able to catch her.  He laughed and said "I'm not trying to catch her!  I'm just trying to buy you some time to get away!"

Sigh. Well, it worked, at least.

Tonight, it looks like I'll be hooking up the electric fence... again.  

Wildcare

For Mother's Day, I gifted myself with something I've been meaning to do for several years:  I volunteered at Wildcare. 

I've mentioned it here before:  Wildcare is a wildlife rehabilitation center out near Noble, run by an amazing husband and wife team.  They take in injured and orphaned wild animals of all kinds (well, not exotics or pets), nurse them back to health, and release them into the wild again.  I have a huge amount of respect for what they do, and the focus and hard work it takes to keep on doing it.  Because the animals need care around the clock, and every day of the year, no matter what the weather is like, or how you're feeling or what you might rather be doing.  In baby season they  might have 100 baby squirrels, rabbits, racoons, 'possums and birds to feed, so it takes a lot of hands to get all that work done.

Hungry "baby" crow

And now my hands are helping.  I spent three hours on Sunday morning in the Bird Room, cleaning cages.  It's not glamorous by any stretch.  There's a lot of bird poop involved, some of which can just be wadded up with the old newspaper and thrown out, but some of which has to be scraped off the towels lining the bottom of the cages so it doesn't nasty up the washing machine.  Some birds make a lot of poop.  And some birds, like the crows, eat icky stuff like fish heads and mouse parts. 

Still, I enjoyed interacting with the animals.  There was a trio of juvenile crows who looked like full-grown crows but still begged for food every time I got near the cage.  There were tiny little woodpeckers that hang upside down from the roof of their cage, or cling to the sides, which are draped in towels to give them a nubby surface to climb on.  There were baby jays and mockingbirds and finches. There was a grackle that had lost both his eyes to an infection. There was a fluffy baby barred owl and a baby hawk, both of which looked like they'd been pulled backwards through a hedge.  That's just the way baby raptors look – an unlovely beginning for birds that will be so regal and beautiful as adults.

Curious, adorable baby possum

Every 30 minutes, all the bird babies have to be fed.  The woman running the bird room would stop whatever she was doing and go from cage to cage, feeding each gaping baby bird with whatever specialized bird chow they required.  She used a syringe topped with a short length of rubber tubing to get the food down into their little gullets.  There was a whole nest of tiny, ratty-looking baby starlings in an incubator and every time she opened the door  all the babies would start screaming and begging.  She poked bits of fish or fruit into the crows' mouths, too.  And after she had fed all the little mouths, she set the timer and went back to cleaning cages until DING!  Time to feed the babies again.

Unhappy adult possum!

I also cleaned cages for a pair of young squirrels, an adult opossum, and several baby 'possums.  The baby 'possums are the cutest things in the world.  They are curious and fearless and would pad over to me to investigate when I opened their cages.  With their little black hands, bright eyes and sharp noses they're just adorable.  But the adult was a different story altogether.  She remained covered in her box, hissing and growling furiously at me the whole time I was working in her cage, and when I lifted the box to take a peek at her, she was drooling and wild-eyed, hating me.  They are wild animals, after all.  And even the cute little baby 'possums need to grow up with a healthy fear of humans, so we're not supposed to handle them unnecessarily.  

When I got home I was utterly exhausted.  The work isn't hard, but there's a lot of bending and stooping, and it was three hours of non-stop physical work, which I don't honestly do very often.  Also, sad to say, I'm not as young as I was, and all that bending is rough on my back. 

Nevertheless, I found it very rewarding, and promised to be back again this coming Sunday for another round of cage cleaning and dish washing.  If I'm a good volunteer, and prove to be reliable, I may get a chance to feed the baby squirrels and raccoons someday.