Saving Mr. Awesome

Meet the most awesome, the cutest and the tiniest cottontail bunny we’ve ever seen: Mr. Awesome, aka “Spunky.”

And how did we make his acquaintance?

Ah, now therein lies a tale, Oh Best Beloved.

Last week a neighbor’s cocker spaniel found a bunny’s nest in their yard. Being a fairly typical dog, said pup “squeaked” some of the other babies, but for some reason known only to her carried this one around in her mouth for almost half an hour without chomping on it, as Baby Rabbit squealed for help throughout. The owner was able to get the bunny away from the dog and gave it to me.

He was so little–just three days old–that his ears were barely half an inch long. As soon as I had him in my hands he just snuggled in, and went right to sleep. He was so small he fit in the palm of one hand. And so soft!

We made a place for him as close to the nest as we could but still safe from the dog. Momma bunnies will search for the little ones when their nest has been disturbed, and it’s best if a baby bun is reunited with its Momma. Unfortunately, after 24 hours Momma hadn’t found and reclaimed little Spunky, so we took him to the Aves Wildlife Alliance, a brand new licensed wildlife hospital located in Neenah, Wisconsin. It’s a wonderful place! The owner, Rebekah Weiss, who has a degree in wildlife ecology and wildlife management, worked for several years as a state and federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator near Milwaukee. Just this June, she opened the new Aves wildlife hospital near the Fox Cities on the grounds of a farm that’s been in her family for five generations, after moving back to the area with her husband, Dave. As of this week, Rebekah has already had over 130 patients.

Rebekah even had baby bunny formula right on hand! Wow. Baby cottontails are super hard to keep alive, from what I’ve read, and she confirmed it. Rebekah told us that Spunky is doing awesome now, and thinks he has as good a chance as possible.

Rebekah accepts all varieties of injured and truly orphaned wild critters in the Aves Wildlife Alliance hospital, except bats, deer, eagles. Just some of the wildlife I remember her mentioning that have come in as patients include chipmunks, bunnies, squirrels, possums, deer mice, owls, redtail hawks, and downy woodpeckers. You’re not allowed to see her patients or touch them, because, of course, they are wild and human contact stresses the critters, endangering their recovery.

It was super neat to see the clinic, and meet Rebekah and Dave. We’re really hoping Mr. Awesome makes it. He is an adorable little guy, and put up a real fight to survive (which is why we’ve nicknamed him “Spunky.”)

In Wisconsin, licensed wildlife rehabilitators like Rebekah may not charge for their services, so all her funding comes from donations and grants. If you’d like to help the Aves Wildlife Alliance out, donations are welcome. You can help ‘em get more baby bunny formula as well as cover the myriad of other expenses involved in running a wildlife hospital. Contact information is on the Aves Wildlife Alliance website (which is a new work in progress — it’ll have more information in the future).

BTW, the hand holding Mr. Awesome in the photo belongs to Michael. Spunky certainly felt right at home snoozing there!

Recipe: Take One Part Nature, and One Part Technology…

As promised, I have lots of photos to poke through and then share. This one is a bit of me experimenting, as the monarch butterfly and flower were dangling over a really ratty looking chunk of concrete. I couldn’t get my camera to blur the background so that it didn’t look icky.

So… I took several versions of the shot anyways, and then played around a bit with my graphics package to delete the skuzzy concrete background.

And… Voila! Now I can share a shot of one lovely monarch butterfly visiting a Gallardia flower.

Technology. Gotta love it.

Chippie: R.I.P.

Dear Neighbor,

Today, when you were busily squirting (what I presume was) weedkiller around your yard to kill off little stands of Public Enemy Number One (to the uninitiated, that would be “dandelions”), you also nailed a chipmunk.

It had been bouncing about, as chipmunks do, scurrying back and forth across the street all day.

After it ran right across the area you had just sprayed, it managed to stagger back across the street, had massive convulsions and died (after suffering horribly) a few moments later in our yard.

Yes, there are lots of chipmunks in this world. What’s one chipmunk?

Well, let’s see, it’s a mammal… like us humans… and reacts to poisons the way we do… and that should raise at least a little warning bell, don’t ya think?

I do.

Tonight, I for one am massively pissed off at everyone who feels that it’s fine to poison their yard “because it doesn’t harm anyone” and who says, regarding the use of pesticides, that “it’s my property so I can do what I want.”

Tell that to all the chemically injured who are harmed by the pesticides and other chemicals used around them. Tell that to the Gulf War vets, who were poisoned by pesticides. Tell that to all the women who have suffered breast cancer and second-hand infertility from pesticides (as well as from other chemical exposures). Tell that to the mutated amphibians, the reptiles and mammals, the birds and what seems like just about everything living that’s negatively impacted on one level or another by these chemicals–even if they aren’t killed outright.

Tell that to the chipmunk.

Oh, wait. You can’t. It’s dead.

We Return You To Our Irregularly Scheduled Program…

Ta Da! I’m back blogging. Didn’t mean to disappear since spring. The short explanation: the Universe has been viewing me thusly:

‘Nuff said about that.

The owls are fine, we have a very endearing bunny from this year’s gargantuan “crop” of bunnies that we’ve named Dandy, lots of new flowers to enjoy, a woodchuck (!), oodles of chipmunks and squirrels and, thanks to record rainfalls, an insanely huge population of mosquitoes.

Have I mentioned the bats? They are most welcome each evening as they swoop in to feast on the skeeters. We also have the most toads I’ve seen in thirty years, including one that is absolutely humongous who glares at me whenever I poke about in ‘his’ garden beds.

I’ve named him Bartholomew.

Pictures to come.

Hoppy Easter!

All of the bunnies that frequent this blog would like to wish you a very Hoppy Easter.

If their voices sound a tad muffled, it’s because we now have Flying Tigers patrolling the yard. So, the bunnies are sending their best Easter wishes and waving ‘hello’ from hiding spots.

Flying Tigers?

Indeed. Here they are:

A pair of great horned owls and two owlets! We’ve been watching them since the owlets popped their fluffy heads over the top of the nest. It’s a first for us. While we’ve heard and (more rarely) seen great horned owls about us for years, neither of us (nor anyone we know) has ever seen a nesting pair. It’s wonderful!

They’re called Flying Tigers because in their realm they are as ferocious a night-hunting predator as the tigers of the jungle are, and are as feared by the local wildlife. A great horned owl hunts everything from mice to raccoons, and is the major predator of skunks. We can attest to that, btw. They aren’t the least bit bothered by the odor when a skunk has sprayed them in its last act of defense (ugh) although we can smell the owls after they’ve nabbed a skunk as they fly by! They are amazing hunters, and impressive just to watch, to boot.

Here’s one of the adults guarding the nest (the fuzzy white at the top of the nest is the heads of the owlets). The adults are enormous birds, over two feet tall with wingspans that are close to five feet. I can attest to how startling it is to have one of these magnificent birds fly over your head at a distance of no more than fifteen feet! Their wings and feathers are such that their flight is virtually noiseless, which adds to the “startle factor” when one of them swoops overhead.

Here’s one of the owlets watching the photographers. They’re a fascinating mix of cute and ferocious, aren’t they?

And here’s the same shot, but without the close-up, so you can see, Oh Best Beloved, just how big that “baby” and nest are. We estimate that the nest is close to three feet deep and two feet wide. Trust me, there is no safe way to get close enough to it to really find out!

If you’d like to know more about great horned owls, Max Terman’s book, “Messages from an Owl,” is an outstanding source of information on them. Max has spent decades studying great horned owls, and his book details his discoveries as he raises and successfully releases back into the wild one particular owl, Stripey.

For those who are worried about the bunnies, yes, the population has diminished. As I counted fifteen one day alone in our yard last year, and plenty more all about the area, the large local rabbit population is undoubtedly one of the reasons the owls decided on nesting in this area. However, the rabbits have plenty of hidey holes. Both BB and Dude are fine, but are much more cautious wild bunnies than was their wont in the past, as one would expect.

And just to allay any of Kris’s fears of bunny loss, here’s a little softened ‘portrait’ shot I took of BB at dusk recently, when she was carefully hidden underneath a bush right by the house. Can you believe it? She’s all grown up!

My thanks to Dan and Eric, who took all the owl photos and gave me permission to use them. You guys are great!