Wildlife Rehab Center

Danielle's Daisy troop is working on their caring petal. At their last meeting they helped make a quilt to donate to a child with cancer. I saw that our local wildlife rehab center is looking for people to donate homemade rice bags to use for their orphaned wildlife babies, so we are going to make some of those at our next meeting. We are considering taking the girls to the wildlife center at a future meeting to donate their goodies. Since it's been a couple years since I've been there, I thought Danielle and I should check it out before we drag 20 other kindergarten and first graders there on my suggestion!

I took the kids there a couple summers ago. We had a really good time. When Danielle and I went this time, though, I wasn't convinced it would be a good outing for the whole troop. I'm not sure there's enough to do or see to make it worth the drive, at least at this point in the year. Maybe when the weather is better.

Put an animal in front of Danielle, and she's happy, though.

The fox is still there. Someone "kidnapped" it from it's mother when it was a baby. They wanted to raise it as a pet, but wild animals do not make good pets (duh!). This poor fox can't be released in the wild now because it would rather associate with humans than with other foxes. I felt bad for it. A pen doesn't sound like much of a life, does it?

The raccoons were also a failed attempt at making wild animals into pets.

Not all the animals are there because of human stupidity. Some were orphaned when their parents were hit by cars or because they injured a wing/leg/eye and it won't heal well enough for them to survive on their own in the wild. There was a cooper's hawk there that is blind in one eye. Cooper's get so focused on chasing their prey that they often don't notice a window or garage door. The one at the center hit a window. Our neighborhood cooper's was chasing a bird one day and bounced right off our family room window. Thankfully he was ok.

I don't remember why the coyote is there, but I think he would be teased mercilessly if his wild packmates could see him now. He's quite chubby, which is not the way coyotes were meant to be! At least he has a home and food (plenty of it). He whimpered like Clara, and we really wanted to scratch his fat, fuzzy belly.