The seal goes home!

First off, sorry I've been mia from this blog for the end of summer. I've been spending less time at Paws, and more time working with domestic animals of various sizes and filling out applications for vet schools. But there will be more updates.

BUT - the harbor seal that we've had for a long time, has finally been released back to the wild! You can read it about it in the Seattle times or on Kiro


Here is the fatty seal still in his pool at Paws, getting ready to go home :).

Squirrel season!

Squirrel season is officially in full swing. Last night we had no volunteers show up, so we got to work, moving efficiently and speedily, to accomplish the nights chores. 6pm - feed all the nocturnal animals - I made a delicious meal for all our raccoons, that included dog food, sun flower seeds, apples, and some fish.
Then we tubed a few of the animals not eating on their own, did a few cleaning chores, and got started on the evening med list early. Luckily the med list was shorter than in past weeks, and we got through it in record time, finishing by 8:30.
So I felt like we were doing ok to get out of paws on time at 10pm... Then I remembered the squirrels.
A week ago we had about 5 squirrels, we now have over 20. All getting fed formula/milk out of little syringes, which is not a fast process. Its lucky baby squirrels are so cute!


(Someone on youtube feeding a baby squirrel).

Some of the volunteers from the bird nursery came up and helped, since they are running low on baby birds (their season ends as our second squirrel season begins). But feeding them just takes a long time, no matter how cute they are. Especially when one of them says he's not hungry, and squirms and screams at me instead. I finally discovered he prefers being wrapped in a towel like a burrito, and then he was willing to drink his 8ml of formula.
It was around 9:30 by the time we finished with the squirrels (overall it took maybe 2 hours, since other people started at 7:30). Then we rushed through the evenings chores, and head home after 10:30. It was a full, squirrel filled day. And it may only get worse in the next few weeks :).

Releasing animals

Probably one of the best parts of working at Paws Wildlife is getting to release animals back to the wild. Last week I released 2 crows and 6 ducks. Our naturalist considers a plethora of factors and chooses them a perfect release site, then we take them out and set them free. The crows had been antsy the whole drive down to their park, and as usual with birds when I opened the box they immediately flew out and were gone.
Then I drove the 6 ducks down to their park, which had a nice big pond in it. I set the crate about 10 feet from the pond and opened up the door... And noone left. So I rattled the crate a little, tilted it up, still no movement. I then just stepped back and waite, and first one guy walked out tentatively, then the other 5 all followed a little more bravely. The 6 made of a bee-line to the pond, and jumped right in.

Here is a picture I snapped of them just after they got into the water in their new home:

Raptor week.

Its only the 2nd day of the work week for me and already so much has happened. Wednesday evening we had to give meds to one of our Red Tailed Hawks - it seemed intimidating, because usually the raptors are not on the med list (or we can just shove them into their food) and as you can guess, raptors are a little scarier than say.. a crow or pigeon. But in the end it was just like giving a shot to any animal - you just had to wear gloves and hold his feet still also :).
Thursday I started off watching our vet put a little foot wrap on another red tailed hawk - he had punctured his foot with his own talon.
Then we got in a young coopers hawk - who was so cute and small! Well, small for a hawk (still bigger than most birds we deal with), which probably means he is a boy.

(a young coopers hawk from wikipedia).
He had some dirty scrapped up wings - our hypothesis is that his legs are not working well, so he's dragging himself around by his wings. He had scraped one of the wings so much that some bone was exposed, so his prognosis is not promising, but I hope he makes it. He was a fiesty little guy :).
And then that evening I got to assist feed another red tailed hawk! Which means I shoved a dead mouse down his throat while someone else held him. I really had to push to get it down, and you end up with your finger all the way down his throat, it was cool! Then I massaged his chin/chest a little, to get him to finish swallowing (ie until there was no longer a mouse tail sticking out the corner of his mouth).

I also helped weigh our barn owl in the evening, and I was happy that my raptor handling skills have definitely improved.

In other non raptor news - we gave some meds to a little chickadee who was so fierce and tough for his size. He kept biting my hand while someone was giving him fluids, it was cute. It did actually hurt a tiny bit...

And the best part of my day - Someone brought in a young pigeon, and she was convinced it was a bald eagle! For the record it looked just like a pigeon, though he was a little balding. She said she had called fish and wildlife and described the bird and was sure it was an eagle. Then when we told her it was a pigeon, she said "Are you sure??" and seemed skeptical. I personally am pretty bad at recognizing birds, but pigeons are one of the few I know :).

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.

Feeding baby birds

Sunday the bird nursery was short volunteers, so I stepped up and spent the morning feeding baby birds. The baby birds that are not self feeding yet need to be fed every hour, and it took me almost 45 minutes to get to all of them, so as soon as I finished a round it was time to get more food and start again. They are pretty darn cute though.
I did the first round of the day at 8am, and the little guys are sooo hungry since they went all night with out eating (maybe they should learn to feed themselves!). So you walk in and 5 little birds are lined up with their mouths open, following you around. And the guys in the next room over were trying to get food through the mesh wall they were so hungry. This is what they are like at 9am:

The ones on the hill I was feeding were old enough to be out of nests and hopping around though. You wave a little syringe with bird food over their mouths and they open up, and you keep feeding them as long as they keep gaping. Once they get full they stop opening up their mouths. The self feeding ones just fly away from you if you get close. So I'd just walk around the enclosure waving my syringe and feeding anyone who asked. Then I gave them some meal worms, which they thought were delicious. But it was cute - the younger ones couldn't rotate the worms around in their mouths to go down easily like the older guys, so I had to get them in the right way. We have one room of crows, and they where soo hungry. They're the biggest of the birds I had to feed and ate like 10 times the amount.
One of the enclosures had 3 little tiny bushtits, who are adorable birds, and they hung out with a flycatcher, because they'd be in the same cage earlier. So all three crowded together on a rope pressed up next to each other looking cute.
After I finished my first round someone asked if I'd given the cedar waxwings their blueberries, which I hadn't (I don't know my birds and what they like!). So my next round I came in with the blue berries and they where SO excited. One snatched it out of my hand as it came out of the container cause it wanted it so much, while he was flying! then they perched and ate a bunch of them (though some other birds stole a few).

(house finch)
And in the same enclosure as the waxwings was a very annoying house finch. He came to us because he had been landing on people at parks! He is habituated. He kept trying to land on me, and I'd shoe him off, then find out he was riding on my back but was so small I didn't notice. So each round I had to aggresively shoe him off and swat at him, and then he finally gave in a little and just followed around on the ground. He even at some food from me, even though he's old enough to self feed.

Feeding the baby birds was fun, for a little while, but I was excited to get back to the rest of the animals in the afternoon. Baby birds are so time consuming!

a few more tidbits

I know I just posted a lot - but I have some cool stuff to share from the Paws Blog. First of all the bears have been so madly cute all week! They have a few big branches hanging from the ropes from the ceiling and they love them! They climb up onto the branch (or leap from boxes etc) and then swing and swing, till another bear kicks them off. Here is some cute footage of them:

I don't have any footage of them swinging on the ropes, hopefully they'll post some of that! (again, the blog is blog.paws.org ).

And we got some really exciting news - someone got a picture of a deer we had rehabbed and released back in 2007, with her baby! So that's proof that not only has she survived in the wild, but she even reproduced! We must be doing something right:

(We know who it is based on the paws ear tag she is still wearing).