First Week Over...

My first week of rehabbing animals is done! I've got Tuesdays (today) and Wednesdays off to just do whatever. Today I went into Friday Harbor to send some letters and pick up supplies. I walked around "downtown" for a while - the town is absolutely TINY!! There's a movie theater - which only plays 3 movies at a time. And lots of souvenir stores selling kitschy little things that are rather overpriced and not my taste at all, of course. X-D

The only problem is that I had to make two trips to get everything I needed/wanted from the grocery store (or, as it's called here, the Market) on one of the center's "intern" bikes. Which wouldn't be too bad, except that it's a tad too tall for me (and a "guy" frame, which makes it worse) and the seat is really hard. So I'm pretty sore from riding on that thing for at least 16 miles (it's about 4 to town). On the bright side, the scenery is really nice. San Juan Island is very bucolic, and there were some amazing views on the ride.

I did manage to find a spot in the intern housing that gets a patchy phone signal; it'll be decent for a while, then suddenly completely drop out. Unfortunately, this means I'll have to wait until I can get into town (or somewhere NOT in the middle of a valley, which Wolf Hollow is) to call people back home.

And now to talk about the really good stuff - the work! So far, it's been a little overwhelming
trying to learn everything and adjust, but it's been really cool, too. I've spent a lot of time preparing food, feeding, and cleaning up after the animals. There are some really neat patients right now. We've got tons (or it seems that way!) of birds; some are adults that just need "supportive care" until we know they're ready to be released, but we also have nestlings that would never survive without help. Some of the young birds get fed every half hour, which gets a little annoying after a while, if you're the person doing every feeding. ("I just fed these birds and I have to do it again?!") We've got three starling nestlings right now (or at least they could be starlings), and they're pretty ugly. But the sparrow is cute, at least to me.

Two of the starlings - see how unattractive?

Especially when they gape for their food - their mouths are humongous!

Notice how cute this guy is. (Or at least try to imagine. He was hopping around so much I couldn't get a good picture! But he has these adorable little fluffs of feathers on his head reminiscent of Einstein.)

We've also got six fawns, at the moment, four of which are doing wonderfully, but two aren't doing so well. There's also a baby squirrel, two goslings (one is smallish and still very baby-cute, but the other is in kind of an awkward phase between baby-cute and adult-handsome), three ducklings (a hooded merganser, a wood duck, and a mallard, which are all in the same tub to provide a social grouping for them), an adult (?) mallard, three (at least essentially) grown barn owls and one younger one that doesn't have all its feathers yet, a bald eagle with a broken shoulder, an adult cottontail and two infants, two young river otters, 5 young opossums, and 7 young raccoons. I think that's basically it, apart from all the songbirds.

We got a fox kit in the first or second day I was here - she was pretty adorable, but understandably frightened. You can see her head in the picture, during her initial physical exam. She'd been trapped by a person who said that if he saw her again, he'd kill her (to protect the game birds he raises), so the decision was made to try and raise her to be released in the fall. Unfortunately, she ended up dying a few days later. :'-(

One of the really great things about Wolf Hollow is the chance to work with raccoons. There hasn't been a case of a raccoon acting as a rabies vector species (only bats have been found carrying rabies) in this area, so interns can actually handle the raccoons. We still have to take special precautions, though, because of a certain worm they naturally have in their gut that can infect humans. Baby raccoons look pretty cute. Once they get to a certain age, however, they apparently all become pure evil, and ours are just getting to that age. They're very growly and will gladly bite or scratch you, if you let them. I was transferring 5 of the coons to an outdoor tub for the day, and the first one I picked up decided he did not like it one bit! He was the squirmiest thing I think I've ever tried to hold on to! He made the worst noises, as though I were torturing him instead of just scruffing him like a mother might do, and tried his best to get either his claws or his teeth into me. Fortunately for me, I didn't have to take him far, I was wearing gloves, and he didn't manage to get me. The lesson: they may look cute, but raccoons beyond a certain age are evil, evil creatures!

The river otters are also really cool, although one of them is way too friendly. I think she may have come from a different rehab center (she got here before me) because she was imprinting too much on the staff there, which is exactly what you DON'T want to happen. I'm not sure we're having much more success preventing her from imprinting on humans, to be honest! The other problem we're having is that she doesn't seem to understand how to eat from a bowl. She'll eat from a syringe all day, and she's eaten food off a spoon a couple times, but bowls seem to completely baffle her (granted, it's not natural for them to eat from bowls, but a tiny sparrow figured out after a few hours that the food was now coming from a toothpick instead of a beak! You wouldn't think it'd be that difficult for an otter to realize that the dish contains food and yes, she can actually eat it without it coming directly from the hand of a human!). (The picture is Penny, one of the staff members, demonstrating how to use a syringe to give formula to an otter during my first day of training.)

We also constantly get phone calls about potential patients or other animal issues. (My least favorite thing so far has been having to answer the phone!) I got to go out with Penny to pick up a deer carcass from someone's driveway (I think if it had been fresher - it had died the night before, probably after being hit by a car) and, supposedly, pick up a new animal from the airport. (We take in cases from all over the region - other islands, mainland towns close to Anacortes, and even some from other rehab centers.) The plane was running late and we ended up going back to the center because we'd have had to wait too long. The only other call I've gone on was to try and rescue a fawn that got attacked by a fox. It supposedly stood in a pond for 45 minutes (not a good sign) before we got there, but as soon as Sarah R (a staff member) moved towards it, it leaped away. So none of my calls have resulted in a new live animal coming in yet. :-( With seven weeks left, though, I'm pretty sure I'll get something soon!

The really exciting news came tonight - we've finally got a seal pup in!! I can't wait to see it on Thursday - hopefully it will make it that long! (I've heard the seals have a pretty high mortality rate...)

I haven't talked about anywhere close to everything that's happened, but I think this post is long enough already. ;-)