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Critters Gallery

Like many of you our interests in animals goes well beyond the birds that we keep here in the aviary. We feed the local wildlife extensively. Sometimes using the feeders that Jeff builds and sometimes inadvertently through the leftovers from our own animals. This past Spring (2006) we had a rather unusal occurance. A female squirrel was hit by a car in the road directly out front. I was upset when I moved her off of the road because she was full of milk and had obviously been nursing young. I told Jeff that there must be some babies around our property somewhere that were going to very hungry.

Sure enough three days later I heard mewling sounds coming from the wooded area in front of the house. Searching the trees I finally spotted a nest about forty feet up in the branches of an oak tree. The poor little creatures were climbing in and out of the leaf nest calling pitifully for Mom to come home. Jeff backed his truck up to the bae of the tree and placed an extension ladder in the bed resting against the tree trunk. He climbed the ladder and used a long pole to dislodge the babies one at a time. I caught them in a bird net as they fell and placed them in a spare cage. Although their eyes were open, they were so hungry and weak that they didn't resist being handled.

Using kitten milk replacer I bottle fed them for the next three weeks. All four (three boys and one little girl) not only survived, they thrived. Once they stopped nursing and were eating on their own we released them on our back deck to go live in the woods. They moved off into the woods but continued to return to the feeder on the deck all Summer and Fall. The female and two of the males still come to visit every day. Their antics have provided hours of entertainment.

Enjoy the photos.(Click on the pictures fora larger image.)

Janis

The Release! Letting go is hard, but it's for the best. I did everything I could to raise these babies. They're healthy, playful, and old enough to be on their own. I hope that they'll learn to fend for themselves. We put their cage on the deck with a nestbox inside and left the cage door open so that they'd have a safe place to return to. They scampered off and never looked back, but they kept returning for hand outs. The woods out back became their home and our deck became their playground.

Of course we set up the feeders to attract birds. We do get quite a variety.

Surprises! Living on 7 plus wooley and wooded acres that are bisected by a creek with a 3/4 acre pond in the flood plain we see a wide variety of wildlife. Some are welcome like the songbirds, hummingbirds, deer, muskrats in the pond, wood ducks, mallards, canada geese, great blue and green herons, and even the cottontail rabbits (who sometimes get into the annual flowers I plant each Spring). The occaisonal woodchuck doesn't really bother us either; they are kind of cute in a myopic sort of way. Some are unwelcome like the raccoons, occasional weasel, and the one lone coyote who crossed our property one summer afternoon. Occasionally we get a real surprise. I didn't realize that woodchucks can climb as seen in these photos of a youngster who somehow climbed up to the second story deck to help himself to some goodies at the "bird" feeder.

	Talk about surprises! This juvenile red-tailed hawk swooped down on the feeder one day. He missed the bird that he was trying for and entangled his talons in the wire mesh on the deck railing. All I could think of was how the heck am I going to untangle him and still walk away with all of my fingers. Before I had to actually face that challenge he freed himself and sat posing on the railing for these shots!


Okay! I fibbed! We don't really have Moose in our pond. These two pictures were taken at the Milwaukee Zoo last Summer. However the rest of the photos below were taken out our back door.

Jeff and I aren't the only ones here who enjoy viewing the visitors outside our back door. Nikki and Jack both keep a close eye on the activity outside.