I’m off to Poland today, but I’ll arrange for posts to be put up as if it were a normal day. None of them, however, will be weighty. This first one starts Tuesday with some rodential cuteness.
Reader Diana MacPherson sent in a photo of a batch (I don’t know what the technical term is) of orphaned red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus). Here’s the story:
A friend of mine found the babies around her complex last night – two out in front of her house and two in a corner. Mom was nowhere to be found so something tragic must’ve happened. She is feeding them pedialyte with a syringe every 30 mins or so & they are in a nice warm box with a hot water bottle. I hope they do okay. The local humane society wouldn’t take them nor would a bunch of different rescue places, so after placing 10 calls, she is going to try to look after them until they can go out on their own. She said they are three boys & one girl.
Now it distresses me that a rescue organization wouldn’t take care of this cute little bunch. If you live near Mississauga, Ontario and have advice about squirrel-rearing, please leave information in the comments below. I’m not sure whether orphaned squirrels can become wild squirrels on their own, or need a certain amount of tutelage!
Here is what appears to be a lot of good information about rasing baby squirrels and how to eventually release them back to the great outdoors.
Woops. Here it is:
(http://www.orphanedwildlifecare.com/squirrelcare.htm)
That looks like a very comprehensive site.
Thanks Jesper! It looks like she is doing all the right stuff but little animals can be tricky. She lost the female in the night (she was weak when she found her) so I hope the boys make it! Who knows how long they were all alone without mom when she found them!
np. 🙂
Has she tried the Vet College in Guelph? They might be able to assist, at least with advice, if they can’t take the little fellas into the wildlife re-hab clinic.
http://www.ovc.uoguelph.ca/services/
Good luck to your friend Diana. We had two Eastern Greys that were orphaned when a large horse chestnut tree they were living in was chopped down. They had been used to coming into our house for sometime before their home was destroyed, mainly to beg for food, so afterwards they just stayed.
I had a large wooden box with a mesh wire top I had formerly kept my snakes in, so we used that for a cage. Whenever they were let out they tended to destroy the drapes and curtains by scurrying up them. Lot’s of giggles for us kids, but not so much for our parents. We finally turned them loose on the grounds of the local zoo (Seattle).
So my advice is to get them into an enclosed space before they get too frisky…
Poor little guys, I hope they’re ok.
” a batch (I don’t know what the technical term is) of orphaned red squirrels”
There seems to be three choices.
A colony of squirrels.
A dray of squirrels.
A scurry of squirrels.
A scurry of squirrels has a nice alliteration.
But why not “a squee of squirrels”? That is what comes out of my mouth in any case.
After looking at the photo, it seems “a scrunch of squirrels” would be a good name.
For a batch of baby squirrels, I believe the correct term is a “squeeness”, as in “A squeeness of baby squirrels lived in the tree.”
Seems to me the relevant fact here is that they’re a litter of squirrels, i.e. siblings gestated together.
They may grow up to be part of a colony, dray, scurry, or whatever. But they’re not there yet.
Two things you might want to keep in mind. Squirrels shouldn’t eat human baby formula and they need to be stimulated to urinate.
I’ve never raised orphaned squirrels, but I have a bit of a squirrel obsession and have gone on reading binges and I remember those two things as coming up multiple times.
Indeed, Jesper Both Pedersen’s link claims it is vital or baby squirrels can be hurt:
“They may be peeing a bit on their own, but this can simply be overflow from a distended bladder, and if they are not stimulated the bladder can rupture.”
Dunno about rupture, but they make it out as a function that can cause potential problems without the stimulation help.
That should be “discomfort and potential problems”.
That stands to reason. Kittens and puppies have to be stimulated to pee and poo by their mothers and orphans need to be artificially stimulated. Until they are able to take care of their own bodily functions, perhaps the kind carer could make good use of these : http://goo.gl/CX10VV 🙂
It looks like a litter to me.
pedialyte is a fine start but I hope by now they have had food…. there must be a wild life rehabilitation expert in the area, call the State Fish & Game and it will know .
It’s actually really annoying. She called 10 different places when she first found them only to hear, “we won’t take any more squirrels”. These red squirrels aren’t a common here in Southern Ontario mostly because they like a pine forests so they aren’t in cities all that often.
Should we intervene in such a situation?
You have a point there. But we’re only human, I am afraid. Look at that picture: squeeeee! There is something unbearably cute about rodents.
I save everything – even spiders that scare me!
note this great squirrel story in the ny times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/opinion/sunday/squirrel-power.html?comments&_r=0#permid=18
The good thing is the squirrels have each other. From what I read if they have squirrel pals, they learn to be squirrels but one squirrel won’t learn how to interact with squirrels so will be a foreigner to squirrel culture and won’t know how to speak squirrel so won’t be able to survive in the wild.
I like red squirrels. They are feisty because they are more territorial than grey squirrels and it’s funny that something so small and cute (being half the size of a grey but bigger than a chipmunk) can be downright ornery to other squirrels. 🙂
(warning: anecdotal evidence from a non-expert) Yes, they can be released in the wild after hand-rearing them. They will let you know when they want to leave home!! I was a kid when my family found and raised two in Florida (Rocky and Bandit). After their release, they would hang out with me whenever I climbed trees in the yard…in other words, they would climb me as I was climbing the tree. It was blatant harassment.
Note: Keep the toilet seats down at all times while they are in house (though, luckily, squirrels float), and realize that they will think your head is the “top” of the tree. Dress accordingly.
Cute, but it’s very difficult for me to look at squirrels and not see critters who steal a large percentage of my hickory nut crop. I have a large shellbark hickory nut tree with the tastiest nuts you will ever find, but I’m lucky if I get more than a handful. It is amazing that they sense what nuts are blanks or have worms in them. If there is a nut lying on the ground near the tree chances are it is bad.
That is what evolution is – discernent, efficiency. A smart squirrel has its own x-ray!
I can empathize. I have half a dozen large walnut trees that from July onwards are taken over by hordes of squirrels by day and of dormice (Glis glis, even more adorable than squirrels) by night. By the time I should be able to collect them, the good walnuts are all gone. The solution I found is to collect some in June (still unripe) and use them to make walnut liqueur: by August I can sit in the garden and observe those adorable rodents at work while happily sipping my liqueur.
Same problem for those of us trying to raise hybrid, blight resistant American chestnuts.
Do you belong to the American Chestnut Foundation? I grow a couple of hybrids from Oikos Tree Crops.
Yep, I’m on TACF’s Science Cabinet. Not sure what the pedigree of what Oikos’ trees is, but suggest you join TACF to both support the mission and, especially if you’d like to grow trees as close to American as possible, to be able to avail yourself of the most advanced backcross material available, currently the F3 generation of the third backcross generation (BC3F3).
I raised two orphans this summmer and can give advice. They need a heating pad right away. Feed them Espilac (puppy replacement formula) Mix the powder (1 part) with water (3 parts)
Contact me.
I have given them a warm Gatorade bottle and blankets to snuggle with and they have had pedialyte, my hubby is looking after them today and he said that they are eating whole grain cereal with honey on. We are continuing to feed them about every 30 minutes or so….any other advise would be wonderful thank you!!
@ Smithsonian:
How One Nuclear Missile Base Is Battling Ground Squirrels
If you have nut trees and want to get nuts. they need to have squirrel guards.
My nextdoor neighbors raised some squirrels. They never come visit me because they have access to horse and chicken feed and have no need to leave his place.
My trees are so close together they jump from tree to tree.
@ #3
A “dray” of squirrels has the longest history, dating back to Topsell’s, History of Foure-footed Beastes, 1607. For anyone interested in the names and histories of collective nouns for animals, An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton is a fantastic book. Most of the collective names date back to the Middle Ages.
Aww, they are so cute! 🙂 But as for taking care of them, you’ll need a soft, warm place to keep them in, and you’ll need to help them with things like using the bathroom and stuff like that. They’ll probably need round the clock care and feeding, and you’ll need to constantly keep up on their hunger levels. In my biology class in high school, a kid had found some baby rabbits (the mother had been killed by his dog) and was trying to take care of them, but they all ended up dying due to to the fact that he couldn’t help them go, and because he didn’t feed them enough. I assume squirrels might be the same way, seeing as how they’re both biologically similar.
Perhaps the organization is cognizant of the pest status of red squirrels. More than larger squirrels, they nest and store their food in attics of homes, and summer homes that may be vacant in winter months can suffer tremendous damage from this species. They can even chew into wires and cause fires. Hence, there are lots of web pages like this one that provide advice for homeowners who are trying to protect their homes from red squirrel damage.
A few weeks ago, I found a litter of red squirrels outside my house here in Mass. They too were spread out over a fairly large area and I’m not sure if this is normal or not. The female may have been taken by a predator. The nest hole in the tree they had come out of was within a few feet of my house and one had wandered approx 200 feet away from it.
There’s a squirrel forum online. The Squirrel Store on their website has all kinds of info.
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