Learning To Fly

Lucky Garvin
Lucky Garvin

Sometimes, being a ‘rehabber’ puts you in interesting situations.

When we first began rehabbing, we had been provided the challenge of raising a 7.5 gram flying squirrel. Seven grams is somewhat small. A nickel weighs five grams. Heaven’s little emissary. She could stand – all four feet, on the last segment of my thumb.

We set a ‘mush bowl’ in front of her – a baby food jar lid with baby cereal. She stared at it in horror. As tiny as she was, it would be like me putting you in front of a swimming pool full of porridge and say, “Dig in! Don’t fall in!” Even now, fully grown, her foot is not as big as my fingernail. We named her ‘Milligram.’

[Flying squirrels, of course, don’t fly; they glide. They have redundant skin on their sides, from forelegs to rear legs that expand into an aerial plane when they stretch their legs. Their tail is flat, unlike the full tubular shape of a grey squirrel’s tail. It serves as an air-foil or rudder.

Apparently, they make splendid mothers. The story is told of a Park Ranger who happened to be near a medium-sized tree when it fell. He was standing next to a small ravine. The mother flyer fled, so he picked up the four babies shaken free by the fall. He felt something hit his shoulder, and the mother flyer ran down his arm, grabbed one of her babies, ‘flew’ across the ravine to a neighboring tree, deposited her off-spring, flew back, etc, until she had reclaimed and secured all four.

“Herself” and I were sitting on the porch one evening. Sabrina was reading from the ‘Squirrel Manual.’ “We have to teach Milligram how to fly.”

“Who ‘we’?”

“‘We’ we.”

I stared at my wife. “We’re a little short of expertise here, aren’t we?”

Sabrina went on to explain that a flying squirrel that cannot fly cannot be released into the wild, and since the rehabber’s prime directive is to release, we were in a bit of a bind; this was not a chore we could sidestep. We were duty bound to teach Milligram to do a thing we could not do.

So down to the squirrel room we go.

The book said to put the flyer up on a high shelf, back off, slap your chest and call her name.

Sabrina put Milligram on a shelf, stepped away, and tapped her chest. “Come, Milligram! Come!”

Millie looked at Sabrina with magisterial disdain, then stared down at the floor which must have seemed the equivalent of an eighteen story drop. She looked back at Sabrina. She twisted her head cynically as if to say, “Look, lady, ‘tiny’ is not a synonym for ‘stupid.’ No way! Not this chick!”

Sabrina is very fearful. She doesn’t want to hurt her baby. I had an idea. “Let me put on an apron, hold it wide and you toss her to me.”

Okay. Sabrina backed off about four feet cupping little Milligram in her two hands, took a large step toward me and dropped Millie gently into my apron. I looked at her. “Honey, that wasn’t a flight; that was a deposit.” She knew this, of course, but she couldn’t stand the idea of injuring the baby. The longest recorded glide of a flying squirrel is 300 feet, so we had a long way to go.

“Okay, okay, I’ll throw her. But I’m not going to watch.” She backs up, closes her eyes tightly. I spread my apron and stare down at it so I can make a quick adjustment to catch her. Out of my upper vision, I sense her hands upsweeping. I focus on my apron. No Milligram. I look at Sabrina, her eyes still closed, her arms still outstretched. “Did she make it?” she said. Milligram was slowly swinging by one paw from one of Sabrina’s fingers, gently to and fro. I swear Millie looked relieved.

I took Sabrina aside for a husband-wife chat. I said to her, “Look, lass, this falls under the “Boomerang Theory of life.” She looked at me. “You know, if you want your boomerang to come back, first you’ve got to throw it?! If you want ‘Milli’ to fly, it is a prerequisite to let go! It’s a good lesson for life.”

Okay, one more try. Sabrina backed up, closed eyes and swooped her hands. I spread the apron wide. Milligram grabbed at Sabrina’s hands, missed and ended up in a pile of blankets beside me. Now, she looked really annoyed.

Here endeth the lesson for today, and all subsequent days. I love that little one, but if she was going to learn to fly, she was going to have to teach herself . . .

Which, by instinct and perseverance (and eventually letting go better than some of us!), she did!

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