Summer Internship Week 3
- Emma Jefferson
- May 30, 2022
- 2 min read
May 30th, 2022
Centre Wildlife Care has been really busy during the holiday weekend. The more people that are out and about outside, the more animals we get. It's always nice to see that people care about animals though. Serious talk time. If you do ever find an animal, make sure to never touch it with your hands, and to never feed it! It can be dangerous if a sick animal is made even more sick by an improper diet. People also put themselves at risk to disease by touching animals with their bare hands. This is especially true with rabies vector species (RVS). The RVS in PA are raccoons, skunks, groundhogs, bats, and foxes. Rabies is 100% deadly, and the virus is spread by the saliva, blood, and brain tissue of an infected animal. The only reason we can safely work with RVS is due to pre-exposure vaccinations and extensive training in dealing with them. Rabies is rare in babies of the species that can carry it, but it's better for everyone if they aren't touched with bare hands. Fun fact about me: I was chased by a rabid skunk when I was out hiking in the fall. It followed me for about .2 miles. Luckily for me, skunks don't run very fast.
On to more fun internship news, I've been teaching lots of our baby raccoons how to bottle feed. Our nickname for baby raccoons is "velcro banshees," since they cling on to your arms and scream if they're not 100% satisfied with the service, which is probably similar to human babies. Since raccoons like to crawl and scratch at arms and are really messy, we wear a very flattering and comfortable smock over our clothes when feeding them. I was glad I was wearing it this week, since one raccoon decided to take a huge messy poop when I was feeding him.
Lots of our animals from early in the year are finally ready for release. The first baby squirrels of the spring (a group of 6 red squirrels) was released yesterday. My roommate and I released a group of 4 gray squirrels in our backyard. To release squirrels, you need to provide them with a box mounted on a tree to live in, as well as daily food and water. It's been lots of fun to see them grow up to be released. One of the four squirrels only has 1/3 of her tail, so we call her Stumpy. Stumpy came to Centre Wildlife Care with a short tail, so no-one is exactly sure how it happened. The opossums are growing up as well! Most of them are eating out of dishes now instead of being tube fed, and some of them are starting on solid food. I think baby opossums are my new favorite animal. They're just so cute! As for the most interesting new animals we got this week, we now have a baby gray fox, baby long-tailed weasels, baby skunks, a female Pileated Woodpecker, and a male Orchard Oriole.
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