Wildlife rehab for Tam

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My wife is an animal lover and before she became a nurse late in life she had a lot of free time and became licensed with the State for wildlife rehab. This led my family on a journey of lots of cool stuff...ups and downs and was a great education for my kids growing up. You can guess who got to do all the construction and dirty work😉
Ill post some pics, maybe a video (if I can figure out how) and tell a few experiences......most of my pics have been lost but I do have a few.
This is for Tam😎

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Woodchucks...I had buried a cage underground so only a foot was above grade and four feet below...they dug their holes and were pretty happy growing up until they were old enough for release....all the animals we took in were orphaned babies with the goal of getting them old enough to be released back into their natural habitat....none were ever kept longer than necessary.

[tomf]

Don't think I've ever seen a woodchuck before.

He looks awful cute.

Perhaps he would bite my nose off.


I have tremendous love and respect for people who dedicate themselves to helping wildlife.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of this story.

[cgode]

woodchucks are also known as ground hogs and whistle pigs...same animal...different regional names. Cute yes but to be respected..very powerful musculature from digging and rodent type teeth ..... yup, I’ve been bitten by just about anything you can imagine over the years.... one of these guys bit my hand while I was wearing a welding glove and he still made me bleed just from the crush factor....cool animals though! I do like them

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Grrrr.....While I attempt to figure out how to resize photos from my phone so they download/upload or what ever it is they do (I’m NOT techy by any means) I’ll explain the next animal that everyone knows...Raccoon... we probably rehabilitated several hundred over the years quite literally. We would get them as babies and bottle feed as they usually don’t have teeth when we get them....as they grow they are weaned off the bottle and will eat puppy food for a bit...to prepare them for freedom they are forced to find/catch food in the large enclosure I constructed...it was 18 by 30 and 8 feet tall...it had tree trunks to learn to climb and a small pool...fish and crayfish placed in pool daily so they learned to catch pray...frogs, worms and other food items scattered....they liked anything you would give them. I joked with my wife and told her we should place a garbage can with a bungy corded lid in there so they had a head start on urban survival tactics...😂

They were fun animals....cool leathery pawed hands that would open anything....before release they were each given rabies and distemper vaccines to give them an edge....My whole family actually had to get pre-exposure rabies vaccines to protect us because they are an RVS (rabies vector species) animal and it is prevalent and does occur.
Ill post a pic if I can figure it out

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Got it! not sure if I can repeat the process or not...hahaha

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this was one of our coons on release day....we tried to get them as far from people as possible and release in groups

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Red fox....kinda cute but unpredictable...I never really trusted the reds we had over the years...had one sneak around behind me and bite me in the butt...sneaky little guys.

We also had a fair number of Grey fox and those were mostly pretty cool...we had one that hid from everyone except me...and he would climb me like a tree and sit on my shoulder and nibble my ear....weird behavior and certainly not typical, I discouraged it as much as possible but always laughed when he did it. The Greys are great climbers unlike their red cousins.