All Tied Up

Every day, I am reminded of the harshness of nature and what our wildlife has to endure to survive. Today’s story will give you a glimpse into their world.

It was around 10:00 pm last summer when the phone rang and on the other end of the phone was a very distraught woman. In the background, I could hear what sounded like squirrels in distress.

The woman and her daughter had been hearing the cries for many hours and could not figure out what it was, or where it was coming from. That evening,  the daughter went outside to walk around and finally pinpointed the area of the animal sounds.

What she found were five baby squirrels that had fallen from their nest in a pine tree. The squirrels were about six weeks old and were all tied up together from Pine sap that had gotten all over them.

Over the years, I have had several squirrels brought in tied together, but never as many as five! The way that will happen is that the pine sap will get on one animal and as the others brush up against him, they get all glued together with the sticky sap.

The tails of these squirrels were tied together so tightly that I could not get any kind of space to work the tails loose. It was like five shoelaces tied repeatedly in knots. I had to hurry! One baby was already dead. It had suffocated from the tail of another squirrel being wrapped around him so tightly.   The more the squirrels wiggled to get free, the tighter they got.

The poor squirrels were in a panic. I knew I could not control them enough to free them by myself, so I called a friend, James Carnahan. James came right over, holding all of them while I went to work on freeing them. Much to our frustration, there was only one way we could begin to make headway: I had no choice but to cut the dead one in half since it was still too hard to free him from the tail that had a death grip around him.

I finally got the dead one free, which gave me a very small hole in the middle of all the tails so that I could begin to get the tails all untied. Not an easy job. Once they were untied, all of them had to have several baths in Gojo to get the sap all off of them.

It is a miracle that any of those babies lived! Four out of five made it with every single one of them losing at least half of their tail. They had to have been tied up for several days, as the tails just fell off due to the blood flow being severely closed off.

Humans really do not give much thought to what our wildlife has to endure to survive. This litter of squirrels was lucky because often, they are not found.

I could have not gotten them free all by myself.  A big shout-out to James for all your help!

Copyright 2017 Fran Kitchen
Photo credit: Rick Tomalty Photography
http://www.tomaltyphotography.com

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