For some reason I’m busy rescuing waterfowl these days, and had another call last night from a famous local author whose koi pond became home to a mallard and her new babies (I referred her to the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors). And I’m a sucker for such rescues, especially when they have happy endings, like this one.
Here are the YouTube notes from ViralHog:
“My husband was cutting up a tree that fell down during a storm so we could clean up our yard and while cutting through part of it he heard animal noises. We discovered a raccoon nest and found a baby raccoon that had fallen out as well as 3 other baby raccoons inside the hollowed-out tree.”
Momma Raccoon may have vanished, but the babies will be fine.
But who will look after them? How do you rear baby raccoons?
If the young ones can survive on their own, I have gone to a lot of trouble for nothing. Coons and possums are always a problem on farms, and my solution is to trap them and release them far away. Often they are families of the critters, and my normal thing is to trap them one or two at a time, and keep the ones I trap in a pen until I can release them all together.
I don’t have anything against them, but we just can’t share the seed and animal feed.
I have no idea. If they are old enough to eat I think they like vegetarian. But I also bet they would go for fish or chicken. Our cat Emily thinks chicken is the best food in the world. She goes nuts for it. And by the way, if you haven’t tried a Popeyes chicken sandwich lately, you really should.
Raccoons are omnivorous. They love cat kibble.
My grandfather worked for the DNR, and we occasionally took in animals and took care of them until they could be released or (which was usually the case) turned over to people who specialized in rehabilitating them. We had a very young raccoon once, and he was wonderful. They eat everything (once they’re old enough to eat solids) and are really pretty easy to care for. Of course they are wild animals and not meant to be pets, but he was a great little animal-so affectionate and clever, and I was unhappy to see him go. I think caring for them isn’t difficult, but the problem is always can they be sent back to the wild after they’re cared for.
Off topic but i am looking for help with search function (using Chrome on web).
Someone on neighborhood group has 9 ducklings in a swimming pool.
I want to point them to duck posts here but cannot figure out the search function, If i search for “duck” or “Honey” i get a number of hits but they are not in chronological order. There are filters for “ducks – 491” and “ducklings – 178), but again i cannot get anything in chronological order.
What is a way to search for the duckling-raising posts?
thanks
jah
The best way is to have the person contact me. I am always willling to give advice about dealing with urban mallards.
Thanks! Passed it on.
Hmmm, “duck AND re-homing”?
Does the local search function do boolean operations? If it doesn’t you can probably try a search on Google (with it’s boolean syntax) and append a “site:whyevolutionistrue.com” to that.
That search gives me 8 hits on DuckDuckGo (which is NOT a duck-themed search engine).