Not much to report but yesterday I was THRILLED to find that a gorgeous, boisterous blue jay has decided to become the reigning avian of my yard, swooping around just checking out the scenery. He is relatively new to the neighborhood and I guess he saw all of the activity and had to check it out. So he just flies aound, not stopping at the feeders or birdbath, but watches the others carefully, and of course alerts everyone when he spies the family of crows coming to roost.
On another note, yesterday I had to aid a 2-week-old cottontail baby. Apparently my neighbor accidentaly hit him while she was using the weedwacker, as he had a small laceration on his back. It looked to be healing and he seemed hearty, like his littermates (5 in total) I just picked him up carefully out of the shallow warren and brought him in, wiped the cut with a clean swab and smeared a tiny bit of neosporin in the cut. He was calm (kits usually are - sometimes lulling you into a false sense of relaxation - and then that's is when they try to leap away) and after some quiet soothing strokes, I placed him back into the nest with the others. They already have their eyes open and are getting too squashed and hot in the warren, so they are sort of sitting on top of it today (its a shallow pit the mother dug under our fence - thus an easy target for the weed wacker!) I expect by next week they will be out on their own. My neighbor is aware of them and I told her not to worry -that they'll be gone by next week so she can go back to trimming the grass then. Yes, kits (baby rabbits) can be on their own by 3-4 weeks of age. So if you see one alone, its not abandoned - its either weaned and ready to head into the world or the mother is nearby watching, planning to feed and care for them at night. She never sits with the babies for a long time, so as to not have her scent attract preadators.
And as I have noted before, based on the research I have done, if you find a baby animal or bird, just pick it up and put it back into its nest if you can - the mother WILL come back to it. And, believe it or not, wild baby rabbits ae VERY difficult to raise in capitivity (and its illegal to do so without a special permit) - I leaned that unlike other mammals, their gut is essentially sterile. So when they are ready to wean from milk to solid food, the mother has to feed them some of this special excrement from her body (kind of like poop but not exactly...) that gives them the necessay microbes to be able to digest solid food! If they aren't fed this, they will die of diarrhea from the bacteria on food (grass, leaves, etc.) I never knew a wild animal could be so "high maintenance". What a wierd evolutionary trait that is.
Triathlon pics coming VERY soon. They turned out GREAT!
