My daughter saw a little squirrel huddled in the gutter by our neighborhood park. She came home to get her camera (and her mom) and we examined it from a safe distance. It was breathing and its eyes were open, but it didn’t move when she very gently prodded it with a stick to try to urge it into a box. Her idea was to put it under a tree, where its parents might be able to find it. My idea was to leave it the hell alone because it probably has a deadly disease. Thankfully, my daughter is now a 23-year-old with a degree in microbiology and listens to reason. Ten years ago, I’d have had a dying squirrel in a box in the utility room (or an emergency vet bill).
We’ve been thinking of what we could have called him had we brought him home. Some of the top choices:
Billy (short for William Henry Harrison, because his tenure would have been similarly short)
Alex (for Alexandre Yersin, discoverer of the plague bacillus - rock squirrels are the most common wild carriers of plague, which is endemic here)
Bobby (for Robert Koch, the founder of modern bacteriology)
In other news, while we were on a roll, we also named the three feral kittens, now cats, who we trapped for spay/neuter and release. We decided that the mostly white one with tabby patches would be “Patches”, the black-and-white long-haired one would be “Spot”, and the mostly tabby one would be “Mostly Tabby”. Because you don’t waste good names on animals who will never, ever let you near them, no matter how often you put out food. We’re hoping that none of them finds the baby squirrel before the city Environmental Health Department does.
And what, exactly, is the city Environmental Health Department going to do that will be better for the baby squirrel than what Patches, Spot, and Mostly Tabby are going to do?
Unless you know for sure that the parents are dead, if you find baby animals somewhere, you’re supposed to just leave them alone.
I live beside a creek, and several weeks ago, a duckling was limping and I thought about taking it to my vet but remembered this, and it could swim adequately and the brood slowed down and allowed it to catch whenever necessary. Within a few days, its leg had healed, and one of my neighbors told me later that she saw the injury happen. The duckling was trying to fly, and collided with a tree.
Now I am in Texas and this from a group called Friends of Texas Wildlife (they were just on the news recently.) And I don’t know how it parses for other parts of the country.
They’re going to (well, it looks like they actually did) scoop that little sucker up and see if it’s dying of plague. I believe that Patches, Spot, and Mostly Tabby like their squirrels a little more wiggly.
Our wildlife rescue clinic closes at 5. I seriously doubt it would have survived the night in a box in the garage or on the back porch, and, you know, the plague thing.
I have to confess that I kind of take the same attitude that Bob Ducca does about this. Squirrels aren’t exactly exotic or endangered.
