Seals are still cute and bald eagles are scary.

It was a pretty full week at Paws. Wednesday started off pretty quiet - full of volunteers and not that much to do. Then we got the notice that two more seals where showing up at 4pm, AND our big donors would be going on a tour of the hospital at 7pm - so we had to clean up a lot. We worked on making the place more presentable, then at 6pm both seals showed up, and we split into two teams for their exams.
These guys had been born on a barge, then the barge moved too far for the mom to find them - which means they came to use healthier than some of the others, because they had not been abandoned for long.
The one we examined was nice and chubby and active - making him harder to check out. He was only a little dehydrated, and a little underweight and otherwise seemed fine. Since they came in together the two seals got to remain together, which is nice for them.
Then the next day on Thursday we got in ANOTHER young seal. This one a little less healthy - he was skinny enough you could see his hips. So now we're up to 5 seals - one chunky fat guy whose doing well (he was the one learning to eat fish). One younger one who has been clinging to life for a week, but still making it, and the 3 who came in this week...
We have some very tiny opposums who get tube fed still, and they are still very cute. Plus we got in our first set of young squirrels for the season - they are so tiny they don't really even have hair on them - you can't recognize them as squirrels! They are slightly lower than the weight we usually set to try to rehabilitate them, but we're trying anyways (And we're not sure yet what kind of squirrel they are).
Here is a video from youtube of a 3 week old fox squirrel getting syringe fed - this is what our little guys look like!


On Saturday I went with another volunteer to feed and clean our "young" bald eagle. He is giant even though he's still not bald. While we started cleaning he was perched on his box watching us. Then he decided to fly over us to let us know its his palace, and that was scary! He probably has a 5' wing span already, and we're in a enclosure that's maybe 7 feet wide (maybe 20 feet long), and he flies over us and we have to duck, then he lands right by the door and stares at us. We were slightly startled as you might imagine. Then he lifts up and flies back to his perch (we had to duck again). Eagles are sooo giant up close - especially his legs and talons. He didn't seem aggressive, just wanted to let us know what he could do. Thanks eagle.


(a picture of a juvenile eagle flying, from wikipedia.com).

We have so many raptors that they have to co-habilitate right now. In our largest enclosure (the flight pen) we have two coopers hawks and a great horned owl all hanging out together. They're pretty cute.