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When I was about 10 years old, my best friend and I loved to roam the woods around her house. One day we found an abandoned nest of baby flying squirrels. My friend loved animals and nature even more than I did, so she immediately brought the animals back to her house.
She kept these squirrels for about a month, feeding them out of an eyedropper. She lost one or two of the babies, but most of them grew larger and healthy. Then one day the mother of one of our mutual friends called a local wild animal rescue concerning the rapidly-growing squirrels. The rescue informed my friend that she had to turn in the animals right away, which she did.
Unfortunately the squirrels, for whatever reason, all passed soon after my friend had to turn them in. For years in youthful fury she maintained that she’d been raising the squirrels just fine, and it was the supposed experts who didn’t know how to take care of them.
The situation in which my friend and I found ourselves wasn’t that uncommon. Recently MSNBC posted an article with tips on what to do if you find an injured or abandoned wild animal in your yard.
The most important thing to remember is to pay close attention to the animal before approaching it. Is it acting strangely in any way – such as staggering around, foaming at the mouth, not walking in a straight line? If an animal has a visible leg injury that might prevent it from walking properly that is one thing, but if it appears to be disoriented it might have rabies, so contact your local animal control immediately if that is the case.
Even if the animal does not appear rabid, there are still a few other things to consider before trying to bring the animal into your home. Are you sure that the animal is actually in distress? Sometimes people find animals in their yards that they’ve never seen there before, like turkeys, and automatically assume that if the animal is there, something is wrong.
Also, just because you’ve found a nest of baby animals (birds, squirrels, or anything else), that doesn’t mean that the little ones have been abandoned. The mother might be off foraging for food. My childhood friend and I were convinced that the mother squirrel had abandoned her children because before we came along the neighbor boys had already put their hands all over the nest, and we thought the mother wouldn’t come back. This isn’t necessarily true, so try watching the nest from a distance for several hours to see if the mother reappears.
If you’ve definitely got a case of an injured or abandoned wild animal, the next step is to seek knowledgeable help. Your local animal control might know a thing or two about your wild animal, but their specialty is dealing with domesticated pets and rabid animals, so you might need to seek additional aid.
You’ll need to contact a wildlife rehabilitation expert. These are people, mostly volunteers, who have been certified by the state in treating and handling injured wild animals. They’ll be able to tell you what to do with the animal, or, in most cases, be able to take it off your hands and care for it properly.
You can find tips on what to do with injured animals and databases to search for wildlife rehabilitators in your area on the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association’s website, or on other such sites like Wildlife Rehabber.
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*(This image by ellenm1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.)
