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How to tell who needs a mama and who doesn’t
Is he an orphan, or does he just play one in your backyard? Here are some tricks of the trade the Toronto Wildlife Centre passes on to callers to help them figure out who still has his mama, who needs a mama, and who’s just fine on his own, thank you very much.
The poop test. Birds who appear abandoned to the untrained eye may simply be fledglings on the verge of learning to fly. But because they are constantly eating and pooping, baby birds emit telltale signs when they are still under the wing of their parents. That’s why callers who report possible orphaned songbird situations to the Toronto Wildlife Centre are instructed to move the birds into a shoebox lined with a paper towel, wait about an hour, and then call back to report what’s in the box. “If there’s no poop in the box at all, or if there’s just like one kind of yucky-looking little poop in there … then that might suggest that it’s an orphaned bird,” says executive director Nathalie Karvonen. “If there’s like 20 poops in the box and they’re beautiful poops—light-colored on one side and dirt-colored on the other … you’ll say, ‘Nothing to worry about. That little guy is being taken care of by his parents.’ ”
The flea inventory. Mother animals groom their babies incessantly, and baby squirrels in particular are fairly free of fleas if they are still getting some mama love. “Our experience has been that if [callers] can see multiple fleas on a baby squirrel, it’s orphaned—almost all of the time,” says Karvonen. “If they maybe can see one flea after they really, really look hard, it’s probably okay.”
To reunite those squirrels with the mother, it’s important to keep them warm; the mother is more likely to take them back that way. “And it’s not a towel—everybody thinks a blanket or a towel will keep them warm,” says Karvonen. “That only really works with animals that are old enough to thermoregulate properly.” Heating pads, hot water bottles, or even a plastic bottle filled with warm water will do, as long as the callers are checking every hour and a half to two hours to ensure the babies are still warm.
The pant-tugger warning sign. Pant-tugging antics indicate a potential lack of parental guidance for baby squirrels, says Karvonen. “When they’re about six weeks old and they’re dopey and they really don’t seem to know anything about predators and they’re running up to people, our experience has been a lot of the times these are orphans as well,” she says.
The growling ’coon. Many of the calls the Toronto Wildlife Centre receives regarding potentially orphaned raccoons are about animals who’ve reached a stage where they can venture out on their own. At that point, they might even make a bit of noise, says Karvonen. “When they’re old enough that they’re actually starting to growl and avoid people, if they look perfectly healthy, we just simply tell the callers to leave them there, even, in some cases, if we know the mother is gone,” she says. Callers should check to see that the raccoon is finding food on his own and monitor the situation every couple of days to ensure his fur still looks sleek and shiny, his eyes are bright, and he’s able to scurry away quickly.
The cottontail chase. If people are calling to report an orphaned bunny but have had to chase the baby for an hour to catch him, there’s a good chance the animal knows how to survive on his own. “They can be really small and innocent-looking when they’re running around the backyard; it’s perfectly normal for them to be independent at that age,” says Karvonen.
People also encounter rabbit nests in depressions in the ground while they’re doing yard work and assume that the mother’s absence means she has died or abandoned her charges. But mama bunnies only visit their nests a couple of times a day to feed their babies, and performing a cross-string test will help ensure she’s still doing that, says Karvonen. Using latex or cotton gloves to hide their scent from sensitive-nosed mothers, callers can take two pieces of string, two sticks, or anything else lightweight and place them in a cross formation on top of the nesting material that’s covering the babies. “And then we get them to come back about 12 hours later, maybe the next day,” says Karvonen. “If it’s been moved and the string is all messed up and the nesting material is back over the babies, then you know the mother has been there, fed the babies, put the nesting material back, and then left again.”
The fuzziness factor. “Precocial” baby birds (like killdeer and ducklings) are generally covered in down, whereas “altricial” birds have naked patches on them. The difference is significant: Precocial birds, though able to walk around at an early age, are always with their parents. Altricial birds, on the other hand, leave the nest early. “If [a caller] has got a precocial baby … and it’s alone in their yard, then there’s a problem and you need to do something about that situation,” says Karvonen. “If it’s an altricial bird and it sounds like a fledgling or an older bird that’s in the yard, then that may be perfectly fine.”
A fake nest can be put in a tree for songbirds when they are still very young and may have fallen, but the makeshift home needs to be placed as close to the original nest as possible—and needs to be monitored to ensure the parents return to feed their baby. And of course, the poop test can help determine if the baby is truly alone.
When ducklings and goslings are separated from their families, it may be possible to integrate them with another family of the same species that’s traversing the area. Once when Toronto Wildlife Centre staff approached a family of ducks to see if they would accept an orphaned baby, they got their answer unequivocally. “As soon as they saw us approaching with the duckling,” Karvonen says, “the mother duck just flew at us to knock the baby out of our hand and get her baby back. They can’t count and have no idea it’s not one of their babies; she just really wanted that baby back desperately.”
The pouch babies. As marsupials, opossums carry their babies in pouches, so a small baby opossum by himself is cause for concern. “The mothers generally don’t leave them alone when they’re really tiny little guys,” says Karvonen. “They may have fallen off the mother or somehow been separated from her, and our experience has been that she doesn’t come back looking for one baby that might have fallen off, so that usually is a situation where you do have to get the baby in.” If someone finds a dead adult female opossum, it’s important to check the pouch; often there are live babies inside.
The strange puppies. Some shelters have called the Toronto Wildlife Centre after noticing a brown domestic puppy acting a bit strangely. These are red foxes, says Karvonen. “They don’t look like red foxes when they’re first born,” she says. “Until they’re about six weeks old, they’re not red at all.” Fox babies can be reunited with parents if there is a known den site; once the adults see the baby in your hands, you can put him down, back away, and wait for the parents to retrieve him. Papa foxes will feed their babies once they’re on solid foods, but if the baby is still nursing and his mother is dead, he will need assistance from rehabbers.
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