Animal rescue

Yesterday evening, Tommy was mowing the lawn when he found a baby squirrel in the grass under our front yard tree.  (It's hard to tell from the above fuzzy picture, but it's about the size of a white mouse from a pet store.)  He scooped it up with his gloved hand, and we put it in a cardboard box under the tree, hoping the mother squirrel would come back for it.  I called several phone numbers for wildlife rehab I found online, but it being a holiday, I didn't get an answer anywhere.  By the time it was well dark, we hadn't seen any sign of the mother, so I tucked an old T-shirt in the box with it and left it until the morning to see what would happen.

I got up this morning, expecting to find it either dead or gone, but it was still in the box and wiggling around.  Fortunately, by 7:30 this morning, someone was manning the local wildlife care hotline that hadn't been answered on the evening of the Fourth.  They told me to put a heating pad in the box to make sure it got warmed up after being out all night (although I doubt it got much below 80 degrees overnight; last night I was more concerned about making sure it was in the shade so it didn't get too hot) and either bring it inside or make sure no wandering animals could get to it.  I put the heating pad in the T-shirt and the cardboard box inside George's pet carrier, as it was warmer outside than in, and left a message for the nearest volunteer on the hotline's orphaned-mammal list.

She called me back at about 9:45 and gave me directions to a woman the next town over who was an experienced wildlife rehabber, so I loaded up the kids and the squirrel and drove it to her.  Tommy and I had been leery of touching it, afraid we'd hurt it, but she was like the nurses at the hospital with newborns, just scooping it up with her bare hand and checking it out.  It wasn't hurt at all except for being hungry after having been abandoned for more than 12 hours.  She put it in a lined shoebox with airholes in it next to another similar box with another orphaned squirrel, even smaller than ours, and was going to start feeding it with Pedialyte.  She also had four baby skunks in a cage that looked very fluffy and pettable.

Faith cried to leave the squirrel behind with the rehabber.  She named her Pinky, but I prefer to think of her as Slappy.  She wants us to learn how to take care of baby squirrels now so if we find another we can keep it, although her enthusiasm was tempered when I explained that wildlife rehabbers don't keep the animals as pets but raise them until they can live on their own and then have to release them anyway.  Personally, I was just relieved to have handed the squirrel over to someone who knows what they're doing still alive and reasonably healthy.  I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find anyone to take it and would have to watch it die of neglect.  I was aware of the irony, however, in the number of dead squirrels on the road we passed driving twenty minutes to save the life of one baby.

After dropping off the squirrel, I took the kids to McDonald's to cheer Faith up; then we went grocery shopping.  When we pulled in, who did we see sprawled out on the porch right next to the front door but Slappy/Pinky's mother?  She could come down from the tree to cool off in the shade (I suppose that's what she was doing; she dashed up the tree when we got out of the car) but not to retrieve her baby.  Bad squirrel mother.  If she has other babies up in her nest, I hope she takes better care of them.  Although if we find another, at least I know who to call now....