Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘animal release’

Here There Be Foxes

Posted in Lifes Observations, tagged , , , , , on July 16, 2011| 5 Comments »

Emerging from carrier

The other day we got a call from Sparrow our local wildlife rehabilitator.  There were two foxes that needed to be released.  It wasn’t skunks so I was down with it.  Not that I have anything against skunks, but we have had too many close calls between the husky and skunks, and many a nights we have arisen from our slumber with tears in our eyes due the odor of Pepe Le Pew. 

This morning we picked up the foxes. I believe it was the first time I’ve seen foxes up close and they are incredibly beautiful animals. When the foxes left the safety of the carriers and started running around the woods, well lets just say it was one of those indescribable magical moments that will last a long time for both my wife and I. 

I have been unable to download video onto this blog, so I only brought my trusty little camera down to the release rather than my supercool video camera.  My little camera does take some decent movies and I did manage to capture some of the excitement.  I also managed to create a YouTube account and posted the video here.  So this is my first appearance on YouTube.  Before you click on the link see the photo’s below.  I’d also like to take a moment to thank Robyn (aka Sparrow) and the good folks at Centre Wildlife Care for giving us the opportunity.

Read Full Post »

What Tomorrow Brings?

Posted in Lifes Observations, tagged , , , , , , on July 18, 2010| 7 Comments »

Saturday night my wife and I made a plan.  We were going to get up early, go into town, make a quick stop at the Wild Life Rehab center to pick up some possums (so we could release them) and then spend the rest of the day doing nothing.  Imagine my surprise when Sunday morning rolled around and we were ready to leave before 10am.  That almost never happens, usually on Sunday morning we are just getting out of bed at 10am.

Whenever I put Sequoia in her kennel I always give her a treat, without fail when I open the kennel door she runs in ahead of me and waits for her treat which I put next to her water bowl on the deck of her dog house.  This day however, she ran immediately to the left side of the kennel, put her nose to the floor and stared intently at an old broken recliner that is sitting just outside her kennel, (which I keep meaning to take to the trash).  No problem, there must have been a chipmunk playing in the recliner.  I put her treat down and left the kennel, as I turned around to lock the kennel door I saw some movement at the base of the recliner.  I got on my hands and knees to make sure it was indeed a chipmunk.  Staring back at me was a little black nose with a white little ‘dash’ running down the critters forehead.  It took but a moment for my brain to catch up.  SKUNK!  I threw open the kennel door, grabbed a very reluctant to go husky who was in full hunting mode, and headed for the house.

Stop! Rewind.

Saturday night, after my wife and I made our plans we went to sleep only to be woken up at some ungodly hour to the horrific smell of skunk.  By woken up I mean my wife woke up to the horrific stink who then woke me up to ask how I could possibly sleep through such a horrific stench,  I, now awake, with tears streaming down my eyes could not possibly return to sleep.  My wife however was asleep two minutes later.

Back to the story.

Now what? obviously we can’t leave the dog in the kennel and we have to get the skunks to move on.  My wife calls our neighbour who not only volunteers for, but also sits on the board of directors for the Wildlife Rehab center.  While waiting for our neighbour to arrive I realize it is not one skunk under the chair, it is two. Wonderful.

Our neighbour comes over and amazingly, puts on a pair of gloves, picks up the skunks and places them in a carrier and heads for the woods.  Okay it is never that easy.  She gets the first one in the carrier without too much fuss the second one wraps its little body around her glove, bites at her thumb and sprays.  The neighbour takes a direct hit on the shoulder,  the stench is horrific but the deed is done and the skunks are in the carrier where my neighbour takes them deep into the woods.  Luckily my wife and I only got ‘residue’ spray.  A quick shower got the smell off, and the clothes, while outside at the moment will find their way into the wash and all will be well.

In the end we had a pretty good day, we had a very enjoyable brunch at Denny’s with our brave neighbour, who only slightly smelled of skunk, (seriously I didn’t smell anything).  We got our errands run, released some possums and still managed to spend some time relaxing. 

You just never know what a day will bring.

Read Full Post »

Rude Awakening

Posted in Lifes Observations, tagged , , , on February 27, 2010| 6 Comments »

Saturday started off normal enough.  Got up at the regular time of 5:30am to let the dog do her thing and make breakfast for the pets.  As I crawled back into bed I noticed it was very warm in our room so I cracked one window open about an inch and half figuring that would let the cool air in while keeping the snow and wind out.

A few hours later I’m suddenly awake, my wife is asking telling me there is a bird in the room.  The six cats are jumping off the shelves, dresser and bed, launching themselves at the low ceiling and windows as a little bird zooms around the room.  My wife and I fly out of bed and ‘join’ and by join I mean ‘add’ to the pandemonium.  My wife decides to put all the cats in the bathroom so we can rescue the bird safely.  Putting the plan in motion she grabs a cat and in the bathroom it goes, I’m quick on her heels with another cat.  Two in, four to go.  In the back of my head I hear the voice of worry, is it really a good idea to shove six excited cats who don’t really get along into a tiny bathroom together?  My wife opens the bathroom door to toss in a third cat, in the process the first two escape.  I snag another cat, but when I open the bathroom door I free the captive cat in the process.  Keep in mind we went from a dead sleep to total pandemonium to the implementation of a plan in mere moments. 

“Wait!, where is the bird?” I asked. In the moment I took to try to get a better grasp of the situation I noticed that while the cats were still excited they seemed to be looking for the bird and not finding it.  Could it have found its way back out the window?  We stopped and looked and listened.  No sign of the bird surely if it was still in the room the cats would know, but they were also looking.  My wife went to open the curtains a little wider and she noticed Trouble staring intently, following his gaze my wife spotted the bird on a shelf.  Everybody spotted it at the same time.  Once again chaos ensues.  Now we were a little more awake the task was to toss the cats into the living room.  Once again every time we got a cat out the door, the previously evicted cat would sneak back in.  Finally we got all the cats clear of the room and opened up all the bedroom windows as wide as we could.  Once again we lost track of the dang bird!

As I am starting to freeze to death in our room my wife says to me, “Do you think the bird flew into the living room while we had the door open?” We look stupidly at one another, my wife heads into the living room while I keep watch in the bedroom.  Half a minute later I hear through the closed-door, “The bird is out here”  As I step out the door my wife is heading towards me with a cat in her arms, “Cats back in the bedroom” she calls out as she starts to pass me.

“Wait!” I yell in a panicked voice, “windows in the bedroom are wide open”

“Shit”

I ran back into the unbelievably cold bedroom and closed all the windows.  Once again we were faced with the task of herding all six cats through another door.  This time we had the added benefit of the dog howling away in the laundry room.  Finally we managed to separate the bird from the cats.  The bird (a Carolina wren) seemed to be in good condition and we managed to gently usher it through the door.  My wife and I sat down and took a collective deep breath. After a minute or so of silence I asked,  “So, breakfast at Denny’s?”

Read Full Post »

Fate Or Circumstance: Part 1, Shadow

Posted in Lifes Observations, Small town life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 10, 2010| 4 Comments »

In the early 2000’s I was standing at my teller window when one of our regulars came in to make a deposit. She showed me a picture of the cutest little Siberian Husky puppies one could ever imagine.  Except for the fact that they were adorable and that for once somebody wasn’t showing me baby pictures,  I didn’t think too much about it.  Time passed, another litter of puppies came and went and life continued on its merry way as it tends to do.

Two years later my wife and I are standing in the parking lot of a grocery store in the tiny town of Phillipsburg when my wife tells me she is ready for a kitten, we already had four cats.  “I’m ready for a dog” came my reply.  She told me to start building a dog house.  Building a dog house sounded like fun so why not?  We thought about what kind of dog we would like, we both agreed it had to be big, no drooling, no barking, good both indoors and out, had to like cats and have some guarding instincts.   The doghouse had just gotten underway so we were not quite ready for a dog but we decided to check out the SPCA,  upon entering the dog room the first thing that struck me was the unimaginable amount of noise, it was truly an assault on my ears.  I made my announcement in the middle of the chaos.  “The first one of you who is not barking has a shot at coming home with me.” In a corner kennel was a massive black dog.  It wasn’t barking, it wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to me, the dogs or anything really just lost in his own world.   My wife and I looked at his information.  Shadow was the dog’s name, he was surrendered by the owner with no explanation and it came from our little town.  We asked if Shadow had any issues with cats.  Shadow was then taken to the cat room where a staff member shoved a cat right up into Shadows face.  Shadow could have swallowed the cat whole but he didn’t so much as bat an eyelash, the cat was too stunned to do anything, so far so good.  We put Shadow on a leash and took him outside. The minute he hit the fresh air he came alive and took me for a drag.  He probably knew his name but certainly didn’t care.  He didn’t stop, he didn’t sit, he didn’t even acknowledge our existence and he was amazingly strong, stopping him was quite the issue. My wife would not have been able to walk this dog. There was a mountain of issues involved with adopting Shadow, he had no manners making him difficult to control, he had some health issues as he was loosing hair, but there was something about him that touched both my wife and I so he became a possibility but we were not about to rush into anything, the responsible thing to do was wait, we were not at the point of dog ownership and Shadow was a large handful.

At the end of our road across the highway there is a travel trailer and a dog house which was home to a large black dog.  (At this point we have to travel back about a year from the above story) while driving to work one day we noticed that the travel trailer had disappeared but the dog  was still there, worried that somebody had abandoned the dog we knocked on the closest door we could find.  Turns out the people who owned the house also owned the dog.  That dog was Shadow. (Another jump in time, to our current story) Earlier in the week my wife had commented that we don’t see the dog anymore and we figured the owners schedule had changed (he was a security officer for Penn State) and we didn’t give it another thought until driving home from the SPCA when my wife put it all together.  Once again life in a small town rears its head.

We never saw Shadow again but I think about Shadow often, I feel I let him down. I know Shadow was never meant to be ours, life has a way of telling us what is and what isn’t, all you have to do is listen and in this case there were just too many obstacles being thrown between us and Shadow.  In the end we wound up with the right dog.  Still when I think of Shadow I can’t help but feel a little heaviness in my heart.  I can only hope he found a good home.

Read Full Post »

Leave well enough alone

Posted in Lifes Observations, tagged , , , on December 6, 2009| 8 Comments »

My wife and I volunteer with a local wildlife rehaber to release small wild animals on our land.

Four squirrels brought to the shelter when they were just wee ones were now ready to be released. When we got to the shelter Sparrow, (yes it’s a fake name to protect the innocent and for those that know her it is kind of funny) the director of the facility handed us  two pillowcases, two squirrels in each, both sacks are knotted at the top, the contents of both were hissing, snarling and squirming.   As I held a squirming hissing sack as far from my body as possible, Sparrow  gave us our instructions,  ” just untie the knot but leave the top of the sack twisted,  gently place the whole thing into the squirrel box close the lid and let the squirrels be, they will slowly work themselves out of the pillowcases”.

Off we drove with two sacks of hissing, snarling squirrels in our back seat.  Not much was said on the way home, each lost in thought pretending we were not at all nervous about what may happen if whatever evil in those sacks managed to escape.

I was not feeling overly confident.  Raccoons and possums are much easier, open the cage let ’em out bring them some food and you are done.   Squirrels would seem easy enough to release, but frankly climbing up a ladder with a hissing, growling sack of squirrels in my hand was not overly comforting.

I’m in position for operation squirrel dump.  The plan: 1) Place the sack into the box.  2) Untie the knot.  3) Close the top of the box. 4) latch the top of the box closed. 5) scoot down the ladder for the safety of the ground, while my wife takes pictures.  In goes the hissing sack, top of box is closed and latched.  I’m halfway down the ladder but I’m not happy.  I can never seem to leave well enough alone.  The hissing has stopped there are now sounds at all.  I reach up and give a little knock on the box, nothing.   I climb back up the ladder and unlatch the lid.  All I remember is a grey blob heading towards me, soft fuzz against my check, a growl in my ear and weight on my shoulder and then nothing.  My heart pounding, I’m holding  the ladder in a white knuckle death grip, my wife is hunched over visibly shaking, tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks.  I get myself under control as I know there is another one in the box.  I make it to the ground we are both standing back from the tree watching the box.   “You know,” I said to my wife, my eyes never leaving the small hole in the box. “I never actually saw a squirrel.  How do we know what is really in there?” Her response?  gails of laughter.  My heart finally settling down,  slowly making my way to the tree to retrieve my ladder, that’s when I see it,  just a few feet away lying in the grass is the other hissing and snarling pillowcase…

It seems that if you click on the pictures it makes them better, I recommend clicking on the picture to the right.

Read Full Post »

%d bloggers like this: