Bridget Allison's Blog - Posts Tagged "environmentalism"
Maggie
For twenty years I have been a wildlife rehabilitator. I trained, I apprenticed, I was taught how to diagnose and administer appropriate medications. I ran IV's and transported birds of prey to the raptor center. As rehabilitators, our main goal is to return young to the nest. We watch and we wait. If the mother boots the animal again it is not because it was touched by human hands, but because the mother knows it has a defect. She cannot put braces on her baby with a malocclusion, she cannot take her infant in to have a heart defect surgically repaired. If she repeatedly rejects the infant we raise it and hope for the best. Sometimes things are fine and it remains a mystery what she deemed a flaw. More often as they grow we detect over time what she knew immediately.
Nine days ago I got a two-day old squirrel. No one can do the job of a mother like a mother and I wanted her returned to the nest. The people who turned her in were lovely, but said the squirrel came from a neighbor who wouldn't comply with such a reunion attempt.
I am slightly superstitious, I usually don't name the animals until they are "out of the woods". But for some reason I did name Maggie.
Maggie was acutely dehydrated and I could hear the pneumonia in her lungs. She did have spunk though which sparked hope in me.
I wish for less ordinary wildlife, but when they are in my care they all become extraordinary.
I laugh at myself the way I eagerly watch for the rise of a chest as they sleep or listen for the click-click-click of pneumonia. After all, I'm not safeguarding the life of a white rhino. But I keep the youngest ones in the bedroom until they can regulate their own body temperatures. I get up over and over to heat weight appropriate quantities of formula and electrolytes.
I tell myself I have to earn a living, that there is no shortage of (insert common mammal's name here) and that I need sleep.
But in the end, it is a life and something about it becomes sacred.
Maggie started trying to die in earnest by day four. She still ate a little, I increased feedings by adding shifts of pure fluids between formula feedings. By 4 a.m. of day 5 I looked in on her and she had propped herself up in the tiny corner of the box that was unheated. I call this "moving off the mat", this little suicide. I touched her and she was ice. I picked her up and was rewarded with the slightest of twitches. Without thinking twice I unbuttoned my blouse and held her against my heart. She began to move to warm, to nose and nuzzle against the beat. Once she was moving in earnest I took her into the kitchen and one-handed, filled a syringe. I almost fell asleep, hand over my chest, palming her there for hours. By the time I staggered over and returned her to her box she was breathing, but I was surprised to find her alive a few hours later when I had to get up for work. Later that afternoon she was gasping and moving off the mat again. And I held her against me again. I fed her, she struggled against it. I held her to the rhythm of my beating heart; she took more. I knew she was fading. I remembered another squirrel I had revived over and over but it had taken a toll in brain damage. Still some compulsion made me hold her, flesh to flesh, for one night more. When I put her in the box her mouth stayed mostly open. I expected her to be dead by morning. She lasted until noon.
I waited an hour of so and then took her to a little hollow at the base of a tree where she would be food for some other animal, cold and hungry...finding her like a sorely needed present. A present the Lord made.
Nine days ago I got a two-day old squirrel. No one can do the job of a mother like a mother and I wanted her returned to the nest. The people who turned her in were lovely, but said the squirrel came from a neighbor who wouldn't comply with such a reunion attempt.
I am slightly superstitious, I usually don't name the animals until they are "out of the woods". But for some reason I did name Maggie.
Maggie was acutely dehydrated and I could hear the pneumonia in her lungs. She did have spunk though which sparked hope in me.
I wish for less ordinary wildlife, but when they are in my care they all become extraordinary.
I laugh at myself the way I eagerly watch for the rise of a chest as they sleep or listen for the click-click-click of pneumonia. After all, I'm not safeguarding the life of a white rhino. But I keep the youngest ones in the bedroom until they can regulate their own body temperatures. I get up over and over to heat weight appropriate quantities of formula and electrolytes.
I tell myself I have to earn a living, that there is no shortage of (insert common mammal's name here) and that I need sleep.
But in the end, it is a life and something about it becomes sacred.
Maggie started trying to die in earnest by day four. She still ate a little, I increased feedings by adding shifts of pure fluids between formula feedings. By 4 a.m. of day 5 I looked in on her and she had propped herself up in the tiny corner of the box that was unheated. I call this "moving off the mat", this little suicide. I touched her and she was ice. I picked her up and was rewarded with the slightest of twitches. Without thinking twice I unbuttoned my blouse and held her against my heart. She began to move to warm, to nose and nuzzle against the beat. Once she was moving in earnest I took her into the kitchen and one-handed, filled a syringe. I almost fell asleep, hand over my chest, palming her there for hours. By the time I staggered over and returned her to her box she was breathing, but I was surprised to find her alive a few hours later when I had to get up for work. Later that afternoon she was gasping and moving off the mat again. And I held her against me again. I fed her, she struggled against it. I held her to the rhythm of my beating heart; she took more. I knew she was fading. I remembered another squirrel I had revived over and over but it had taken a toll in brain damage. Still some compulsion made me hold her, flesh to flesh, for one night more. When I put her in the box her mouth stayed mostly open. I expected her to be dead by morning. She lasted until noon.
I waited an hour of so and then took her to a little hollow at the base of a tree where she would be food for some other animal, cold and hungry...finding her like a sorely needed present. A present the Lord made.
