The Vigil

Lucky Garvin
Lucky Garvin

It’s the type of intake all rehabbers dread: An adult, female groundhog shaken by a dog. Dog bites are typically blunt, and although they can gash, they usually impose severe bruising and internal injuries due to shearing forces. [Cats, by contrast, pierce the skin, inoculating subcutaneous tissue with virulent organism, but rarely other internal injuries]. We could detect no external injuries on the woodchuck. Yet Sabrina and I know this didn’t mean much.

For the most part she lay quietly in her cage, eating and drinking some, but in no ways enough. The only time she came viciously to life was when we cautiously and with no small amount of trepidation, moved her out of her cage to give her fluids, meds and oral foods. Then it was a true donnybrook, with her large teeth snapping, doing their best to find flesh – our flesh.

Never the less, after two days or so, we decided she needed to go to The Wildlife Center of Virginia for further diagnostics and treatment.

Early the next morning, Sabrina went to the Animal Room, to arrange her transport. But, to her horror, Sabrina found that the female had given birth to four babies, or pups, One had been stillborn, one killed apparently by the mother. [Sabrina wonders if, knowing she was too weak to nurse, the mother had killed her pup so he would not suffer the agony of a prolonged death. Who is to say? Murder or an act of encompassing mercy?]

Two live pups remained, cold, shivering, and hungry, they held on by a thread.

Our first intake of small woodchucks was maybe ten years ago. There was no information anywhere to guide us in our feeding of them, or such vital data as how much food to feed at what age. But those babies had been several weeks old, the ones we had now were but a few hours old. We placed them in an incubator paying close attention of temperature and humidity.

In the first few days, they lost weight. Then we thought of colostrum. This is a chemical secreted – before milk – and is produced by virtually all animals and birds including humans. In essence, it turns on the GI tract so it can absorb nutrients; it is as the key is to the automobile. In other words, you can feed the ideal food to a baby – any species of baby – and it simply won’t absorb without the precursor colostrum. But where do you purchase ground hog colostrum? Answer? You don’t. So we used what we had, colostrum for calves. And it worked – yhey began a slow weight gain.

At this age, G-hog babies must be fed every two hours around the clock. Did you get that? Around the clock. Start, say, at noon, then 2PM, 4PM, 6 PM and just keep on going. It makes me yearn for the nestlings who are fed every twenty minutes dawn till dusk. These guys were 24 hours a day.

Then the littlest one of them began a ‘clicking’ or gurgling. Pneumonia. Then, this morning, we found him dead in the incubator; dead of the pneumonia we knew was there, but our antibiotics were powerless to cure – this is true in very young humans too, even with the assistance of antibiotics, their immune systems are simply too immature to fight back. I learned, while practicing medicine, that you could have three patients with pneumonia: an eight day old, a twenty-eight year old, and an eighty-eight year old; give them all the same antibiotic, and the two patients at the extremes of life would likely perish, while the young adult likely not. The immune system carries the heavy end of this responsibility; the antibiotic, the lighter end.

And so we fight on with the only survivor or this family who weighs twenty-two grams and is no larger than my thumb.

But, he’s starting to click… And the battle begins anew…

Such days as these fly in the face of our motivation for becoming rehabbers. The ultimate reward is freeing one into the wild, who without us – and others like us – had no prayer of survival. But caring and loss ever have been, and will ever be, reciprocal: the more you care, the more keen the sense of failure or loss.

I remember no conscious decision to love and to commit to animals and birds, domestic or wild. Perhaps I never chose; perhaps He did…

It would be an environmental catastrophe if no animals or birds ever died, so from that point of view, although reluctantly, I see the need of it, the dying…

Just not on my watch.

[Author’s note: Two days after I wrote the above, the small, sole survivor took his final breath went on to rejoin his family in Heaven. Pneumonia. He died. On my watch…]

– Lucky Garvin

SEE SABRINA’S WILDLIFE WEBSITE: FACEBOOK.COM/SWVA WILDLIFE

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