Underweight Juvenile Hedgehogs

At this time of year we are receiving dozens of calls regarding small hedgehogs wandering about during the day.

Hedgehogs are nocturnal mammals and, as a general rule, if they are seen out during the day, there is a problem.

Juvenile hedgehogs are sometimes seen out desperately searching for food in order to gain enough body fat reserves to survive the cold winter months. Any that do not manage this may well die in the colder weather.

We do not release hedgehogs weighing less than 600gms at this time of year, so the first question we ask people is if they can weigh the hog, giving us a better idea of the advice to give. Any that are well under this weight should be taken to your nearest wildlife hospital / rescue centre, where they can be cared for until they are heavy enough for release.

Hedgehogs do not hibernate solidly through the whole winter - in the very cold weather they go into a deeper sleep, their bodies slowing right down to conserve energy. But when we get a break in the weather, a milder spell, they will wake up again and will be seen out and about foraging for food at night, so it is not unusual to see hedgehogs around even in December or January.

If you are in any doubt as to whether or not there is a problem with a hedgehog, please telephone a hedgehog carer for advice. We are always happy to help but other organisations such as the British Hedgehog Preservation Society can give all the advice you need and they also have a list of carers all round the country.

Monday 29 October 2007 at Vale Wildlife

I spent most of last night trying to find the last 2 posts from my old Blog, but no luck.

We recently had another juvenile gannet in, about the same age as the one from a few weeks ago, found grounded near Moreton-in-Marsh. He had no injuries but was underweight. We kept him for a few days and then took him to the RSPCA's wildlife unit near Taunton where he has joined another gannet of a similar age, and hopefully they are both going for release fairly soon.

Over the past 23 years, we have dealt with most species of British wildlife, we don't get many 'firsts', but we recently took in a juvenile merganser which had been hand-reared, had no waterproofing and would not feed itself, having to be force fed constantly. The feeding problem was overcome immediately - prior to coming to us she had only been offered chopped fish which she wouldn't take, a very common problem with fish-eating birds which do not recognise chopped fish as food. As soon as we put a bowl of whole whitebait in front of her, she downed the lot in a matter of minutes!

Secondly we started giving her a daily supplement of thiamine along with other vitamins and minerals. Fish which has previously been frozen is often used for captive birds, and the freezing process destroys the thiamine (Vitamin B1) which therefore needs to be supplemented to avoid health problems.

The biggest problem was her lack of waterproofing. We noticed that she never preened herself, never seemed to look after her feathers at all and they looked very dirty and oily, so we bathed her in warm water and washed her feathers using Fairy Liquid - the water was disgustingly dirty. When we had finished she looked like a totally different bird and straight away set about preening herself and repositioning all her feathers.

She has improved tremendously since she came in, she has had two baths now and spends her time in and out of her water tray, drying out under the infra-red light we have provided and is constantly preening.

We are hoping that, in time, she will be releasable but we need to assess the extent of her imprinting as she was hand-reared.

To be continued...............

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

Hi to all the regular followers of my Blog!

Did you wonder where it had gone? So did I and I was horrified to discover that all my work has gone!
Luckily I had saved most of my posts in Word, apart from the latest two, and so I copied all previous posts into one new one on here. Unfortunately, links in this post will not work and no pictures have saved, but I will try to post more often and include more photos from now on as this Blog site is a much easier one to use.
Apologies to everyone for the inconvenience.....normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.....I hope!!

Vale's history & posts to October 2007

Welcome to the diary of a wildlife rescuer.

Friday, June 15th, 2007
23 years ago I started taking in sick & injured wildlife.
Today I am still taking in sick & injured wildlife but now I do not do it alone. I couldn’t possibly do it without the help of many, many people because we treat between 4,500 & 5,000 casualties every single year.
I want to inspire other people to do what I have done & get involved in wildlife rescue & rehabilitation so through this blog I will hopefully recount some of the ups & downs that I have experienced over the years as well as keeping you all up-to-date with everyday life at Vale Wildlife Hospital & Rehabilitation Centre.
I hope that you will come back regularly to read my updates (see Daily Diary) & I welcome your comments, good or bad.

About

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
I suppose I ought to tell you a bit about myself first.
I am forty something, although unfortunately I will only be able to claim this for the next few months!! Damn, I’ve given it away now haven’t I?
I have always been interested in animals but as a youngster the only involvement I had was all the pets I kept - I never really gave a thought to our wildlife until I was in my late teens. It was then, and by this time I was married, that I developed my interest initially in birds of prey, but then in all wild creatures & David Attenborough became my hero.
It wasn’t until 1984, when a local vet asked me if I would look after an injured tawny owl that I realised that there were very few places in the whole of the country that were helping injured wildlife. It just wasn’t the done thing at the time - injured animals were ‘put out of their misery’ which seemed the wrong attitude to me particularly as it is us humans that cause most of the injuries in one way or another.
At that time there wasn’t much information available about wildlife rescue & rehabilitation so much of what I went on to learn was self-taught, mainly through trial & error. I did however find one book which gave me the determination to try to do whatever I could to help, & that was ‘Something In A Cardboard Box’ by Les Stocker (of St Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital).
That first owl was how it all began, 23 years ago & Vale Wildlife Rescue has now become one of the largest wildlife hospitals in the country.
Please see my ‘Daily Diary’ for regular tales from Vale Wildlife Hospital & Rehabilitation Centre.

If you want to make contact…

There are several ways in which you can make contact with us:
Vale Wildlife’s website: www.vwr.org.uk . Take a look & see how you can help us to help Britain’s wildlife.
Vale Wildlife’s email address: info@vwr.org.uk . Contact us if you have any queries.
Caroline’s email: caroline@vwr.org.uk . If you want to contact Caroline Gould, the Hospital’s Founder & Manager.
Telephone: 01386 882288.
Fax: 01386 882299.

Monday 18 June 2007 at Vale Wildlife.

Although this is our busiest time of year, with some days seeing 30 or 40 casualties coming through the doors, the heavy rain we’ve been having has kept people indoors more & so we have had a quiet weekend.
The last couple of days have seen mainly cat-caught fledgling birds being brought in with mostly minor injuries, so a one-off antibiotic injection usually does the trick. Shame though that all these birds end up in wildlife centres until they are ready for release, when they should be with the parent birds who make a much better job of rearing them than any person.
We also had a young polecat in on Saturday. He behaves as if he’s tame, but this is quite common in wild animals that have undergone some sort of trauma. No obvious injuries but he was very dehydrated so was given fluids on admission. This morning he did have a go at one of our Care Assistants, so it looks as if he’s on the mend!
Late on Sunday night, a hedgehog was brought in with something obviously wrong with his legs. He was x-rayed immediately, which showed that he actually had a broken spine. Obviously there is nothing to be done for this one except to euthanase him. Sad, but at least his suffering wasn’t prolonged as someone took the trouble to bring him in.
Nothing much else to report on the patient front, except that all day long we’ve all been subjected to the constant calling of a young coot that we have in. He’s never quiet!! He came in to us at one day old & we’ve reared him to about three quarters grown now. He’s a real character & it will be brilliant when the time comes to take him out for release. The best part of the job!!
Well, that’s it for today…oh, & by the way, I always call everything ‘he’ unless we are certain it is female!

Tuesday 19 June 2007 at Vale Wildlife

It’s now 4pm on Tuesday and we’ve only had four patients in today! That must be an all time low for June which is our second busiest month of the year. July is always the busiest and next month we are expecting lots of baby hedgehogs, second litters of baby squirrels plus many more birds. Seagull chicks are probably one of the most common July patients as they all start to hatch on the roofs of town factories and businesses, as they get a bit older they begin to wander away from the nests……a bit too close to the edge……and they fall. It’s amazing how they can fall so far yet are often totally uninjured.
One of todays casualties was a young house martin, not far off fledging age but a little too young. The nest that he was in fell from under the eaves and his two siblings died as a result. The third one was luckier and was brought to us. This is quite a common scenario, especially when we have wet weather following a period of dry, warm weather and the nests just seem to dislodge from the walls and fall.
House martins, swallows and swifts are more difficult to rear than a lot of the birds we deal with. To rear them properly is a full-time job, with specialist food needed, regular wing and body mearurements being taken as well as accurate daily weighing. All of these birds now go to one of our volunteers who dedicates her whole summer, and turns the front room of her house (they actually move out of the room, furniture as well) into a nursery for these pampered birds. They get fed a diet of waxworms and flies. The waxworms cost her several hundred pounds every year to buy, and she gets the flies from allowing maggots to pupate and them freezing the flies when they hatch! Yuk! She has learnt so much over the past few years that she knows the exact weight that they need to be to survive, she has all the wing and body weights recorded and she has had amazing success with them. because of all the other animals that we have to care for at this time of year, we could not devote the time needed to rear these birds successfully.
Last night the RSPCA brought in a tiny weasel which was found out alone and was behaving strangely. Assessing a wildlife casualty and trying to deduce what the problem is and what caused it is often very difficult as we are presented with an animal with no history. If a vet examines a dog or cat for example, he usually has the owner there to tell him what has happened (it cut its paw on a piece of glass, it has been vomiting for the past two days or similar) so he has something to work from. However, when a wild mammal or bird is presented to us we often don’t have a clue what has happened to it. We have to give a thorough examination as well as watching closely to see how the animal behaves, how it moves about and whether there is anything out of the ordinary about it. We therefore need, not only a good knowledge of illnesses and injuries, but we also need to know about how that animal lives in the wild and what is normal behaviour for it.
This poor little weasel, only about four inches long, was obviouly in pain when it tried to walk, was dehydrated and was showing all the signs of having suffered some sort of trauma to the head. It was given pain relief, a corticosteroid injection and antibiotics and was made comfortable for the night in an incubator. Sadly, when the on-call Care Assistant checked on it early this morning it was fitting and had obviously deteriorated a lot. The decision was made to put the animal to sleep.
I am going away tomorrow and will therefore not be writing any more posts until Tuesday 26 June but I would love to know your thoughts on my blog so please let me know.

Tuesday 26 June 2007 at Vale Wildlife

First day back after wallowing in the mud at Glastonbury for the past 4 days!! You wouldn’t believe it is nearly July.
Since I was last at the centre, 86 patients have been admitted. Although this sounds a lot, we would normally expect to take in more than this but the appalling weather we have been having has kept people indoors and therefore injured animals are just not being found.
We took advantage of todays good weather though and did some releases: a coot which has been hand-reared from a day-old ball of black fluff went today along with a dozen or so mallard ducklings, all over half-grown now. Some pigeons and blackbirds have also been set free today.
While I was away two badger cubs were taken to Secret World in Somerset to be integrated with others and prepared for release. All our badger cubs go to this centre when they are fit and well as long as their TB tests are negative. We have to carry out these tests before badger cubs are moved around the country because of the possibility of them having tuberculosis which we obviously don’t want to spread around. Unfortunately any cubs which present a positive test have to be euthanased which is very hard to do as they appear perfectly healthy.
Anyway, badger cubs gone, we now have to prepare for the release of the eighteen fox cubs which we have reared this year. They are all big and healthy now, extremely wild and almost ready to be released. Fox cubs are released by a method known as ’soft releasing’ whereby they are put into a release pen on private, safe land (with the landowners permission). Here they are fed in the pen for around 10 days after which time the pen is opened up but food is still provided for up to 3 weeks by which time the cubs have learned to fend for themselves.
Once they have gone, we won’t expect any more fox cubs until next March when the very young ones will start to be brought in again.
7pm. Have just been called out to a swan in Evesham, covered in blood, lying by the side of the river. Will have to end now and continue tomorrow.

Sunday 08 July 2007 at Vale Wildlife

How can some people be so heartless? Today we received a call about a muntjac deer which had been hit by a car about 15 miles from our centre.When our person arrived the poor animal was writhing around in obvious agony, seriously injured with multiple injuries including a compound fracture to one of its hind legs, & car drivers were whizzing past it, not even slowing down & nobody showed any interest in helping it.It amazes me that people can leave an animal to suffer in this way. The person who hit it just drove off!! Sometimes I am ashamed to be a human being!!!
Obviously the deer had to be humanely put to sleep as there was nothing we could do for such serious injuries.

Tuesday 10 July 2007 at Vale Wildlife

Still on the subject of deer, this time fence casualties.Today we have had two very young fallow deer in - the first came in first thing this morning, after being found with a hind leg caught in a fence. This is a common problem that we encounter, deer jump wire stock fencing & one of the hind legs goes down through the wire, the deer falls which causes the wire to become a torniquet around the lower joint on the leg. As this usually happens at night, they are not found until several hours (sometimes days) later by which time the damage to the leg is considerable.This fallow had quite a major injury where the wire had been but luckily he still had circulation to the foot. We will not know for a while whether or not he will make it but he will be having daily treatment to the wound in the hope that it will heal. Constriction injuries often don’t look too bad initially, but after a few days the site of the wire can break down completely and if this happens there is little we can do for the animal.The second one was brought in at lunchtime but his injuries were much more severe. The circulation to the foot had been lost as he had obviously been in the fence for at least a couple of days. (I hope none of you are eating at the moment). His leg & other parts of his body were crawling with maggots & our only option was to euthanase the poor animal.We are all keeping our fingers crossed for the other one!!

Sunday 15 July 2007 at Vale Wildlife

All the recent wet weather has led to a spate of birds such as house martins & swallows coming in to us. The regular changes from sunshine to damp conditions plays havoc with their mud nests attached to walls & they end up falling off. Any youngsters which survive the fall are then brought in to us.
These birds need very different treatment to most other birds where feeding is concerned. All our house martins, swifts & swallows go to one of our dedicated volunteers, Gill, who in the summer, converts her complete front room into a bird nursery where she spends all her day feeding them & allowing them to learn to fly round the room. The diet of waxworms & flies has brought amazing results & Gill achieves a brilliant rate with them. She has also done loads of research on this type of bird, & knows all the correct weights & measurements of them. We are very greatful for all her help.
The young fallow deer that has been with us for a few days now after being caught in a fence by his back leg, is making great progress. He has finished a course of antibiotics & we are changing the dressing every day, which although it is quite stressful for him, has got to be done to make sure that no infection gets into the wound. His leg is healing very well & we are now a lot more hopeful of a happy ending. Watch this space…..

Monday 16 July 2007 at Vale Wildlife

I have just finished strapping up the foot of a tiny little female tufted duck which came in last night, along with her seven newly hatched ducklings. Ang, our Care Assistant who was on-call last night took a call from a lady in the village concerned about a duck in her garden with a broken leg.
By the time Ang, and her partner Billy arrived there, it was starting to get dark and tiny black ducklings aren’t the easiest things to catch at the best of times, but with the fading light and the fact that they were trying to hide under a dense hedge, they had great fun catching them.
Upon examination we found that two of her toes are broken, the bone is actually exposed on one which does not bode well. However, we have splinted her foot - you can see her bright red bandage in the photo below - she is on a course of antibiotics to counteract any infection, and with regular dressing changes, we will just have to see how it goes.
Two call-outs today, both of which sadly resulted in the animals having to be euthanased: the first one was to a muntjac deer that had been attacked by two dogs. She had sustained very bad injuries to her hindquarters, a large piece of her muscle had been torn out so there was nothing we could do for her.
The second call was to a young fox which, like the two deer the other day, had been caught in stock fencing. His hind leg was covered in fly eggs, not a problem in itself, but he had also dislocated his knee joint in his struggle to free himself and had also lost the circulation to his leg below the constriction.
We have had many other casualties today, birds caught by cats, more house martins whose nest had fallen down, a nest full of baby sparrows disturbed when building work was being carried out on a house.
It’s been a very busy and quite a sad day.

Sunday 22 July 2007 at Vale Wildlife

We have been totally cut off since Friday due to flooding. The drive to the hospital is flooded, but luckily the water has started to go down after reaching its peak just outside the doors of the hospital.
The saddest thing for us has been finding a number of drowned rabbits on our site now the water has subsided. We have a thirty acre area in Beckford, which has always been a haven for wildlife, including hundreds of rabbits. The Carrant Brook runs alongside our land, & when it burst its banks the whole of our site was submerged, leaving nowhere for all these animals to go. It makes you wonder just how many wild animals have perished in the floods.
People are now managing to get casualties to us again, they are coming into the village where we have to meet them & bring the animals back to the hospital.
Our main concern now is that there is a chance of the water supply running out as one of the local pumping stations has been shut down due to flooding. We could not manage without water with the 200+ animals we have in at the moment.

Thursday 26 July 2007 at Vale Wildlife

Yesterday I did a piece on Central Television about the plight of local wildlife following the horrendous flooding in our area.
From last Friday until Monday most of our site was toally under water although thankfully it didn’t quite reach the hospital itself, stopping just outside the door!!
The water has subsided now but the 20 acre field which we use partly for car boot sales and partly for the use of wildlife seems very empty. On a normal day you expect to see in excess of 100 rabbits running around, plus mice, voles and hedgehogs and all sorts of other creatures including slugs, snails and worms.
When I walked round it yesterday with the TV crew, it was empty!! It is very sad to think of all those wild creatures drowning, but that is what has happened.
The flood water has covered a huge area of our local countryside, and not much thought has been given to the wildlife that has suffered - understandably people have had other things to think about - but the death toll to our native flora and fauna will have been huge, and the long-term effects are yet to become clear.
The floods have also had a financial impact on us - we have not had a good car boot sale for weeks because of the weather (they usually bring in around £300 per week), fundraising events which we rely on to raise much-needed funds have all been cancelled, our Charity shop in Evesham has not been taking much either. So our financial situation is getting quite dire!
Yesterday we put out an urgent appeal for tins of dog and cat food as we are using over 150 tins every day at the moment but our stocks had gone down to an all-time low with only one days supply left.
Today, people have been ringing and bringing in tins all day, the response has been brilliant, the British public always rise to a challenge even in a crisis. Thank-you to everyone who has donated, and please keep it coming.
A good way of helping us longer-term is to join our Membership, it gives us a regular income and provides members with a regular Newsletter from the Hospital. Please email caroline@vwr.org.uk if you would like to help us.

Saturday 28 July 2007 at Vale Wildlife

Last night we were called out to a young fox which had been caught in a humane trap in the grounds of a large company in Cheltenham. The cub was one of two (apparently) which the company think have been orphaned and they are in a very poor condition. They are suffering from mange, which we have dealt with hundreds of times before in foxes.
Mange is caused by tiny mites which burrow under the skin of the fox causing intense irritation. This in turn leads to the animal scratching non-stop to try to relieve the itching. Eventually the fur starts to fall out, the skin becomes raw, infection sets in and the poor animal either starves to death or the infection causes septicaemia (blood poisoning) which is invariably fatal. Either way, the fox suffers a long, lingering death if the problem is not treated.
Fortunately, mange is quite easily treatable. Medication can be given orally and we have found that this is a good way to administer treatment in foxes that are being fed by people on a regular basis, as the drug can be mixed with the food. Two treatments, one week apart is normally all it takes. For foxes such as last nights which are not being fed regularly and are in a much poorer state of health, we use a different treatment which involves the fox staying at the hospital for a few weeks so that we can inject the medication on a regular basis until the mange has cleared up. Depending on the time of year we may have to keep the animal for longer until the fur has grown back, for example in the winter when we would not want to release a fox without a good covering of insulating fur.
We have had brilliant success with our treatment, not only in foxes, but also other animals such as hedgehogs, and even deer. Some people still have the view that foxes with mange are untreatable and should be put to sleep, but this is wrong as the parasite is not difficult to get rid of and the foxes can go on to lead a normal life back in the wild where they belong.

Thursday 02 August 2007 at Vale Wildlife

It was my intention to add an entry to my blog every day, but at this time of year I am finding it impossible to find a few minutes to write it. However, I will add to it as and when I can.
This time, I have an update on 3 of the casualties I have written about previously.
The little fallow deer fawn which had a hind leg caught in a fence has done really well. His injuries have now healed almost totally and we now have to decide the best course of action for him. As he is so young, and a fallow fawn would normally stay with his mum for around 12 months, we can’t let him straight out into the wild.
We already have large paddocks which house four of our permanent residents: Rodney, a roe deer, Coco another fallow deer, Bleater a sheep and Cilla who is an emu. No, I know emus aren’t British wildlife but we took her on from another centre a couple of years ago and she is really settled here! The plan is to put our fallow youngster in with these four until he is old enough to fend for himself back in the wild. I will let you know how it goes.
Next, the tufted duck with her ducklings, which are now twice the size they were when they came in. Mum had a badly broken foot and we had concerns initially as to whether her foot could be saved, but luckily, although she will always have a deformed foot and a permanent limp, she will manage perfectly well in the wild and we will be releasing her when her ducklings are a bit bigger.
Lastly, the fox cub with mange is responding well to treatment but needs to stay with us longer until he is totally well and fully furred again.
Our recent appeal for tins of dog and cat food has resulted in loads of people bringing in tins. Thank-you to everyone who has responded.
And thank-you also to everyone who has sent a cash donation in too. We struggle to raise the money we need to carry on - now around £18,000 every month, and every gift, however small makes a huge difference to us. We are very grateful for everyones support.
Donations can also be made online through our website should you wish to do so.

Friday 03 August 2007 at Vale Wildlife

Sorry, but I feel like having a moan today and writing is my ‘escape’, I enjoy it and, even if I am writing about my work, it still relaxes me.
There are some days at Vale when I have to admit I wish I was still running a tiny wildlife rescue in my back garden back in the village of Cropthorne, rather than this huge hospital with all the worries and the pressures of being the manager of a business.
If I had wanted to manage a business, be a secretary, hire and fire staff, deal with accounts, find the money to pay people, deal with a mountain of paperwork every day, fill in forms and generally spend my days behind a desk, I would have trained to do that when I left school.
My early days in wildlife rehabilitation were the best. I could spend all my time looking after the animals in my care, learning new ways to treat them, watching wildlife in its natural environment. It was such a brilliant feeling to nurse an animal all the way through from the day it came in with sometimes horrific injuries, dealing with the everyday nursing, right up until the day I could take it back where it came from and let it go. Wow!! That is what this work is all about.
If you are thinking of starting your own wildlife rescue my advice is to go for it as there are nowhere near enough facilities for the hundreds of thousands of wildlife casualties in this country. But my advice would also be to keep it on a small scale, don’t allow it to snowball like it did with me. Enjoy the work, enjoy learning how to care for injured birds and mammals, enjoy releasing them back into the wild, but STAY SMALL.
There are some days at Vale when I don’t see one single animal all day because I am in the office dealing with all the paperwork, computer work and red tape that is essential for keeping a large hospital going.
How are we going to keep £18,000 coming in every single month? I have 10 staff to keep in jobs and anything up to 500 ‘patients’ in at any one time all of which need food and expensive medication to ensure their release back into the wild. The bank balance is never very high so I have to juggle payments and purchases to try and keep everything on an even keel. And do you know what? Some days I hate it and could quite happily walk away from it all. It wouldn’t be so bad if we were financially secure as I could spend more time with the casualties and wouldn’t have to spend so many hours writing begging letters or trying to drum up more support for our membership scheme which brings in a regular income.
Many of our supporters have said ‘when I win the lottery I’ll see you right’. One day I hope that happens so that we can provide the best care and facilities possible for injured wildlife and can pay our Care Assistants a decent wage for doing so and then perhaps I can spend my time on the other side of the office door!!
Well that’s it, I feel better now I’ve written all that! I might even write about some animals again next time, you never know. You will just have to wait and see!!

Monday 06 August 2007 at Vale Wildlife

After a fairly quiet weekend, today has been busy. Several more hedgehogs, babies and adults have been brought in, together with a buzzard which had a severely infected, compound (the broken bone had pierced the skin) fracture to a wing. The open wound was also crawling with maggots, common at this time of year. The only humane course of action for this bird was euthanasia.
A little owl was brought in by the RSPCA which had an obvious problem with one wing. The bird was x-rayed which revealed a fractured radius and ulna to the one wing. If a fracture occurs close to a joint, then it is pointless even attempting to fix it as the bone growth during the healing process (callous) would interfere with the movement of the joint often to the point where there is no movement at all and therefore a bird would be unable to fly. However, in this case the damage to the bones was mid-shaft, well away from the joints and we therefore considered that we should give it a go. The wing was splinted and strapped up, which is how it will stay for the next 10 days (birds bones heal much more quickly than mammals), we will then re-xray before making a decision on whether to continue with the rehabilitation.
I checked on a pigeon which came in a couple of days ago with a large (around 3cm) wound to its neck. The wound was sutured and the bird put on a course of antibiotics. Today the wound is looking good and seems to be starting to heal well.
The healing powers and capabilities of wild animals never cease to amaze me. They can recover from horrendous injuries which domestic animals simply wouldn’t cope with, without anywhere near as much treatment or interference from us as your pet cat or dog would need. In this line of work, time is the best healer with as little input from us as possible. The treatment of wild animal casualties is very often overdone to the point where animals which stood a good chance of survival if left alone, will die because of too much hands-on, unnecessary ’treatment’. This is one of the many, many things which I have learnt during my years of wildlife rehab, interfere as little as possible.

Thursday 09 August 2007 at Vale Wildlife

None of us at Vale are vets. We have nobody with any formal qualifications at all, but over the years we have amassed a fantastic knowledge of how to treat sick & injured wildlife. What medications to give, the amount & for how long (very different to how a domestic animal would be treated), the best way to tackle wounds, which bone fractures are viable & how to stabilise them while they heal, whether the animal is ever going to recover enough to be released back out into the wild. We are extremely proud of what we have achieved & our reputation is now such that vets regularly contact us for advice about wildlife treatment, & we are more than happy to offer advice to anyone who has an injured wild animal.
What really makes me angry is vets who either don’t know how to deal with an injured wild animal, or those who don’t care about wildlife.
A badger cub was brought in the other day (this years cubs are about two-thirds grown now so they are quite capable of inflicting serious injuries). he had been involved in a road traffic accident, obviously taking the brunt of the impact to his head & front end. He had been at a vets for 36 hours, in which time he had been given an antibiotic & a steroid injection & a spinal x-ray had been taken. He had apparently been semi-comatose for the entire time & was flat out when he arrived with us.
The message from the vet was that the x-ray showed no spinal fractures but he did have a ’slight paralysis’ of one front leg. This was the diagnosis after 36 hours of care.
We lifted him out of the cage onto our examination table. He needed no anaesthetic as he was barely conscious. The immediate thing we noticed was that he had obviously been bleeding heavily from inside his ears - not a good sign. The next thing we looked at was his front legs - within about 1 minute of the examination starting we found another problem. The ’slight paralysis’ was in fact multiple fractures at the top of one front leg!! The bone was shattered, & a badger, who relies on very powerful front legs for digging, would stand no chance of ever being released into the wild with injuries like this. We immediately put the poor animal to sleep, which is what should have happened 36 hours previously.
The injury to this badger was so obvious & easy to find on examination that it should never have been missed, & he should not have had to suffer for that long. Luckily, as he was not totally aware of what was going on, he was probably saved a lot of the pain & suffering, but this should not have happened.
I end on a happier note - a buzzard brought in to us during the recent floods is being released today back where he came from. Although he had no physical injuries, the huge area of land locally that was underwater for several days, had meant that he could not find enough food & he was very underweight when he came in. He started eating immediately & has been putting on weight from day one. He is now fit & well again & is obviously keen to get back out into the wild. It is a beautiful day, just right to take him back & this is the part of our work that makes all the bad bits worthwhile, the release. Watching a majestic bird of prey such as this buzzard, fly up into the sky & soar on the thermals, when a couple of weeks ago, he could hardly stand, is an amazing, indescribable feeling.

Saturday 11 August 2007 at Vale Wildlife

We have just come back from walking our dogs round the field adjoining the Hospital, and we have seen so many rabbits with myxomatosis, it’s horrible.
Every so often it comes back again, wipes out about three quarters of the local rabbit population and then disappears again for a few months. Myxomatosis is a disgusting disease, introduced by us lovely human beings back in the 1950’s to control the rabbit population at that time, which it did extremely well. It is spread by the flea, and is often not noticeable until it is so far advanced that the poor animals cannot see predators coming because their eyes are so swollen and infected. They meet their demise either by being caught by a predator, being hit by a car or they eventually die of starvation, but it is by no means a quick death. Myxomatosis only affects rabbits and occassionally hares so there is no threat to humans or domestic animals (apart from yout pet rabbits). We certainly are responsible for some shameful things in my opinion!
Today a group of six of our fox cubs went out into a release enclosure on private land. This is how all our cubs are released, in small groups, staying in the release pen for 7-10 days, being fed every day by the landowner. After this time, the pen is opened up and the cubs are free to go, although supplementary food is supplied daily for about three more weeks to give the cubs a bit of back-up while they learn to hunt and fend for themselves. We have three more groups to go out and then we will be cubless until around next March when the tiny ones start to come in again, the onset of the next busy season.
Soft release, which this method is called, is a much better way of giving cubs the best start to their life in the wild than so-called hard releasing, where they are just taken out into the middle of the countryside and let go. The latter is practiced by some rehabilitators, but it is something which we believe has a very low success rate. Obviously only a small number of the released cubs will make it to adulthood anyway, but the better prepared they are, and the more help they are given, the better the odds in the big, wide world.

Monday 13 August at Vale Wildlife

Update time again. The little tufted duck which had the broken foot, rescued along with her tiny ducklings, is almost back to full fitness and has now been moved to an outside enclosure just until her brood is a little bit bigger when they will all be released onto the conservation lakes in the village, an ideal spot. She actually came from Beckford anyway so will be released close to where she was found.
The enclosure she is in is what we call our Seclusion Aviary, which was built by our staff and volunteers (as are all our pens and aviaries) to house birds which do not do well in close proximity to people. Sparrowhawks are one of the worst species, they are so highly strung and get so stressed when they can see people, that it has been known for them to literally drop dead when being handled, even briefly.
The seclusion aviary is totally enclosed on all 4 sides, apart from the door and it has a mesh roof. Any bird inside therefore hardly ever sees humans which is the ideal scenario for all wildlife but especially for species such as these. The other advantage of this type of aviary is that it has very little wire mesh which can and does cause injuries when birds fly at it, and it also causes a lot of feather damage.
The little fox which was being treated for mange has fully recovered and was one of the cubs put into the release pen yesterday, so he will be back out in the wild within 10 days or so.
The fallow deer fawn with the leg injury caused by a wire fence has now moved to a small outdoor enclosure, a sort of half-way house before he is put into our large deer paddocks with Rodney the roe deer and Coco the fallow, our two permanent resident deer.
And lastly today, several weeks ago we watched one particular edition of the BBC’s Springwatch series and they were showing the epic journey of a family of shelducks, from the moment the adults emerged from their burrow, followed by their brood of tiny, day-old black and white fluffballs, through their 3km walk to the coast. I remember commenting that a shelduck was one of the very few species that we had never seen at Vale Wildlife. Unbelievably, the very next day someone who had been on holiday on the Gower peninsula, South Wales, brought in an abandoned day-old shelduck!! Spooky!!
As we had no other shelducks, we put him with some mallard ducklings of about the same size. He took to them immediately and one in particular became his shadow, they went everywhere together.
Over the following weeks, they grew quickly and all the other mallards were released locally apart from the one that stayed with the shelduck all the time. We couldn’t release the shelduck in this area as they need to be on the coast so we needed to find somewhere suitable where we knew there were other shelducks.
Last Friday morning, the shelduck and his mallard sidekick were released into a lovely area in Essex, salt marshes with plenty of other shelducks for company.
If anyone is interested in seeing photographs of some of our ‘patients’ including the shelduck, I am going to try to set up a Gallery on our Forum which can be accessed via our website www.vwr.org.uk
Please take a look at the forum and the website and if you would like to help us out by giving a donation there is a ‘Donations’ button on the website. Your support would be greatly appreciated towards the £18,000 per month that it costs to continue our work. New Members are also welcomed and an application form can be printed off the website.

Wednesday 15 August 2007 at Vale Wildlife

No normal post this time, just a job advert!
Do you think you’ve got what it takes to work in a wildlife hospital? If you are after a normal 9-5 job with good pay, forget it.
If you want a challenge, want to work all sorts of odd hours, including the middle of the night, will get stuck in to anything to help and promote the charity and raise much needed funds - if you will do all this, and more for a pittance (minimum wage), then this may be the job for you!!!
FULL-TIME WILDLIFE CARE ASSISTANT REQUIRED FOR IMMEDIATE START. Animal care duties in a busy Wildlife Hospital to include: feeding,daily cleaning, assessing & treating injuries & illnesses, aviary & enclosure maintenance, emergency call-out duties, and nights on-call (staying overnight in the hospital).Computer entries, telephone answering & some office work will also be required.
Experience preferred but not essential. Full training given in administering treatments, handling wild animals & dealing with call-outs.
Must be confident to work alone as well as part of a team. Weekends will be included.
Applicants must have a full, clean driving licence, be 25 years of age or over & have a minimum 12 months driving experience to enable them to drive our ambulances. Immediate start required.
There is no accommodation available with this post. Pay details: £214.00 per week gross plus £10 for night on-call. Please email Martin Brookes in the first instance at martin@vwr.org.uk with your details, name, address, cv, relevant experience, contact telephone number etc.
Email with any questions to the same address.

Wednesday 22 August 2007 at Vale Wildlife

It’s been a whole week since I’ve had the chance to write a post here. We have been extremely busy lately not only with patients coming in but also because of staff holiday/sickness/shortage and, as we haven’t the funds to pay for a full-time administrator, the office work has been put on the backburner.
It has also been a good week for releases too: most of our smaller garden birds have gone now (sparrows, robins, dunnocks, blackbird and thrushes), the tufted duck family was released onto the conservation area in Beckford, seven of our many mallard ducklings also went. More of our gull youngsters are due to go for release tomorrow - we don’t let these go in this area, they all get taken to the Welsh coast for release. We are hoping to get another group of fox cubs out into a release pen any day now.
We are getting a lot of young hedgehogs in at the moment, mostly ones found wandering about in the day, which is often the sign of a problem. A majority of them end up on antibiotics as hedgehogs seem prone to almost every infection ever heard of! As long as we get them soon enough they will respond well to treatment, the problems start when people keep them for a few days before seeking help and any infection or illness they may have has had the chance to get a good hold.
We have also had a couple of hedgehogs in with ringworm, a highly contagious fungal infection which can also be passed to humans (in fact, one of our Care Assistants has actually caught ringworm from one of these hedgehogs). Unfortunately one of the hedgehogs died, but the other one is responding well to his treatment.
If you are familiar with the Forum, accessible through our website (www.vwr.org.uk) you will have read about the burnt hedgehog which was brought in yesterday. It had been nesting in a garden bonfire when the householder decided to light the fire without having first checked for wild occupants. This is a reminder to everyone - always thoroughly check garden rubbish before setting it alight or preferably move the whole bonfire bit by bit to a different location before lighting so that any wild animals within it are discovered and can make their escape.
When hedgehogs get caught in fires, the first thing that happens is that they curl up, their natural defence therefore protecting their faces and feet, but their spines melt, as if they were made of plastic, and although this hedgehog has no injuries to his extremities, he has a large area of solid, charred, melted spines on his back. Infection is one of the biggest problems associated with burns, along with shock and dehydration so for the time being all we can do is administer large doses of antibiotics, steroids for the shock and for inflammation and give fluids to counteract dehydration. Only time will tell whether or not this poor hog will make it, if he does survive he will be with us for many months before he can be released.

Saturday 25 August 2007 at Vale Wildlife

On Monday night we had a call-out to a badger which had been hit by a car. Myself and my partner Martin weren’t actually on-call that night, but Ang, the Care Assistant on-call for the night, rang us just before 11pm and asked if we could help out as they were just going out of the door to an RTA fox after receiving a call from Worcester police. Typical, no night-time emergencies for ages, and then two come in about five minutes apart!!
We set off to Dovers Hill in one ambulance while Ang and Billy headed off in the opposite direction in the other van.
When we arrived at the scene, two cars were there, hazard lights flashing, and the badger was lying almost motionless at the side of the road covered in a blanket which one of the car drivers had. I lifted the blanket from the badgers head, he was a very large boar (male) but he didn’t make much attempt to move and I could see quite a bit of blood around his mouth. We carefully lifted him into one of our crush cages and he didn’t put up much of a fight - just as well as I wasn’t wearing the leather gloves which we take to foxes and badgers!
I must admit that I wasn’t too hopeful about this one as he had obviously taken the force of the impact to his head and although badgers are extremely tough animals, brain damage in these circumstances is always the worry.
I needn’t have worried though, as by the time we had driven back to the Hospital, the badger was wide awake and wanting to be out of the crush cage! As a precaution he was given a steroid injection for shock and inflammation and an antibiotic injection too and was made comfortable in our Large Mammal Shed with some food and water. By now, he looked absolutely fine but we decided to give him a couple of days of 5-star treatment at Vale just to be on the safe side.
Last night we were able to perform the very best part of our work - the release! At about 9pm we took the badger back to the spot he was found and let him go at an obvious badger crossing about 5 yards from where he was hit. He knew exactly where he was as soon as the cage was opened, he trotted out and when he was far enough away not to feel threatened, he turned his head to look at us for a couple of seconds and then off he went. They always do that, I don’t know why!!
A fantastic success story. They don’t all end so happily but we have to do the best thing for each animal and if that means euthanasia then that is what we must do, but it is a brilliant feeling when an animal which would undoubtedly have died without our help, recovers and goes back to the wild.
Sunday 02 September 2007 at Vale Wildlife

Over a week since my last post - apologies to all my avid readers (if there are any out there!!).
We have been so short-staffed lately that I just haven’t been able to sit down & think about my Blog recently. Getting new Wildlife Care Assistants is a difficult task. A lot of people think that this is a brilliant job, & don’t get me wrong, it is, but not in the way that some people, particularly youngsters, think. They assume it is going to involve lots of hands-on, cuddling fluffy, cute animals, oohing & aahing over baby creatures of all sorts. They don’t realise that the bulk of the work involves ‘getting your hands dirty’, cleaning out hedgehogs that could poo for England, scrubbing dirty cages, cleaning outside aviaries every single day, even in the rain, wind & snow, dealing with the most vile, infected, bloody, maggot infested wounds imaginable, continuously sweeping & mopping & all sorts of other dirty, monotonous jobs. And all for a pittance at the end of the week.
Without our Care Assistants Vale Wildlife Rescue would be no more. They are the backbone of the Charity, they have to work damned hard for very little reward but they are all dedicated & commited to the animals in our care & to the Charity itself. The work that they have to undertake, particularly during our busiest spring & summer months deserves twice the pay they get, but sadly the charity cannot afford more than minimum wage, & expecting someone to live on that in this day & age is expecting a lot. I hope that one day they can be rewarded for their dedication & we will be able to pay them their true worth.
Anyway, enough of my rambling. We have been releasing more birds this week, gulls, pigeons, a Canada goose, jackdaws, blackbirds, thrushes. We still have some baby hedgehogs & grey squirrels being hand fed but most youngsters that are coming in now are that bit older.
We picked up a young roe deer yesterday with a horrific injury to his face which had obviously been sustained several days ago as it was terribly infected, swollen & full of maggots. Although an x-ray showed no lead, in our opinion he had been shot. The injuries were so severe that he was put to sleep, even before we took the x-ray to save him any further suffering.
Another rescue without a happy ending - we were called to a bird of prey sitting on a driveway late this afternoon. from the description it sounded as if it had probably been clipped by a car & was stunned. We arrived to find a small, male sparrowhawk in a bad way - he had obviously had some sort of head trauma & was unable to hold his head upright at all. Upon examination we found a large infected injury in the lower part of his mouth & his tongue had been almost severed. Again, it had been done for several days & the infection had got too much of a hold to even consider treatment. A sad end to a long & busy day.
Finally, many thanks to all of you who have been kind enough to give a donation towards our work. We are grateful to everyone who supports the Charity & if you are able to give us some financial support, however small you will be helping us to continue & expand the work that we do for Britain’s wildlife.
Donations can be made by credit card (by clicking the donation link on our website, or by telephoning the Centre), or by cheque payable to ‘Vale Wildlife Rescue’ sent to Vale Wildlife Rescue, Station Road, Beckford, Tewkesbury, Glos, GL20 7AN.
Please help us to help Britain’s wildlife.

Saturday 08th September 2007 at Vale Wildlife

Today another group of our fox cubs went off to their temporary accommodation (fox release pen!) where they will spend the next week or so before being released, and tonight we are taking the very last group to their release site - all nineteen of this years cubs released back into the wild where they belong.
Just as the first tiny fox cubs coming in around March each year heralds the start of our busiest season, so the last of them being released in September indicates the beginning of a quieter, calmer period for us at the Hospital. It gives us the winter to catch up with everything which has been neglected over the past few months such as aviary repairs and building, wood treatment, revamping existing enclosures, getting rid of waist-high nettles and thistles etc.
It also gives me the opportunity to try to catch up with some of the paperwork which is piled almost to the ceiling in the office. Dozens of letters, membership paperwork, sponsorships, fundraising begging letters are all waiting to be dealt with (apologies to anyone waiting for a response from me - I will get there eventually!!) We cannot afford to employ dedicated admin staff so I have to get through it as and when there is time!
Back to the important stuff - the animals. The RSPCA brought in a young (but fully grown) female badger the other day which had been hit by a car. In our treatment room I couldn’t see any major injuries when first looked at her, no open wounds, all four legs were working well so no fractures there. We gassed her down to enable us to give her a thorough examination and we soon found the problem when we looked inside her mouth. Her top jaw was split straight down the middle from front to back. We have come across this type of fracture before but this one was also fractured from the middle to the edge of her mouth too and was extremely unstable. (I hope this description explains it well enough). Although we are equipped and experienced enough to deal with most things, I knew straight away that this badger needed the expertise of Ian, our vet.
Although I was pretty sceptical about her chances, I am pleased to say that Ian operated on the badger, wired her jaw up and she is now back with us, doing very well, eating everything and putting up a typical badger fight when we try to administer her daily injection of antibiotics. I am keeping my fingers crossed for a happy ending……but I will keep you posted.

Thursday 13 September 2007 at Vale Wildlife

The Hospital is getting quieter now, we actually have empty cages inside which is something we don’t see much of during the spring & summer months.
We have three rooms for our ‘patients’ inside the building: our ‘Small Mammal Room’ which is normally full of hedgehogs but is also used for rabbits, squirrels, fox & badger cubs as well as a host of other small furries. At the moment the SMR is home to around 30 hedgehogs most of which are youngsters which will move on to one of our outside hedgehog enclosures as soon as they have reached the right weight. Hedgehogs seem to be extremely prone to chest & stomach problems & a majority of the hogs which come in to us need some sort of antibiotic treatment to sort them out. The sooner they start receiving treatment, the more chance there is of them making a full recovery which is why it is very important for people to seek help straight away for any hedgehog they find, rather than to keep it for several days before contacting a rescue centre. Often, by the time the animal is brought in to us it is too sick to respond to treatment.
We have also had several hedgehogs lately suffering from ringworm. This is not caused by a worm as many people think, but is a fungal infection which can also be passed on to humans. The treatment involves spraying the hedgehog every 3 days with a diluted solution of Imaverol.
Our second animal room is the Bird Room which is a fairly busy room throughout the whole year as between 60-70% of our annual patient intake is birds, the most common type being pigeons & doves. This year we seem to have been unusually busy with birds of prey such as buzzards & tawny owls too. Our patients remain inside the hospital building until they are either well enough or old enough to be moved on to an outside enclosure, the next step in the rehabilitation process, preparing them for release back into the wild.

The third animal room inside is what we call our Brooder Room which, as the name suggests, is full of brooders & incubators. It is our intensive care unit for the very sick, badly injured or baby patients requiring much more hands-on care than some. It contains several temperature-controlled incubators of varying sizes & is also where all the hand-feeding of our baby birds & mammals takes place, sometimes as often as every 15 minutes for some birds! During the spring & summer months this room is a hive of activity from dawn until late at night, but it is now only home to a few young hedgehogs & squirrels.
Besides these three rooms our hospital also houses our reception & shop, where new patients are booked in, & people hopefully spend a bit of money or give a donation (every single patient that we deal with costs an average of around £48 to treat, so we do try to encourage people to give a donation when they bring an animal in). We also have an office where we do our admin work whenever we can, an overnight room where the member of staff who is on-call each night stays, a staff room for our tea & lunch breaks, a wash room which is not only for washing the 200+ towels that we use every day but it also has a power shower for cleaning oiled or contaminated wildlife. This room also doubles as our dark room for processing x-rays. We have a Treatment Room which is equipped with just about everything a vet would have in a surgery including anaesthetic machine & x-ray facilities. Lastly we have the Food Prep Room with areas for preparing all the food we need for our patients. There is an area for meat preparation, one for fruit & veg & one for all the seeds & other dried foods we use. There is also a large fridge & freezer & a dishwasher to help with all the dishes we use each day.
That is our hospital in a nutshell, a very busy building for much of the year.

Wednesday 19 September 2007 at Vale Wildlife

I knew I was tempting fate when I said it was getting quieter!! This past week has been anything but quiet.
As normal for this time of year we have been taking in underweight, juvenile hedgehogs on a daily basis. With hedgehog numbers on the decline we need to make sure we do everything possible to get them fit & well & back out into the wild, but out of all the mammals we care for hedgehogs are the ones which seem to suffer the most infections & therefore need a wider range of treatments than any other.
We have also had several baby squirrels brought in, the second litter of the year for these often unpopular creatures. Squirrels are probably the easiest mammal to hand-rear as they take to the artificial milk substitutes that we use very readily & take it from a syringe like there’s no tomorrow!
The badger with the fractured jaw has had it all wired together & is making good progress, managing to eat everything we put in front of her despite the state of her mouth.
The burnt hedgehog is also doing well, although she looks a lot worse now than she did when she was first brought in. All the dead, burnt tissue is starting to come away now, revealing a large area of fresh, healthy tissue. Every 3 or 4 days, we are anaesthetising her & cutting away more dead areas. This has to be done so that infection doesn’t set in between the dead & new tissue & to allow healing by granulation to take place. It is still going to be a long process, but she is doing well so far.
A couple of days ago the RSPCA brought in a juvenile gannet which had been found in Redditch, about as far away from the sea (where he should have been) as you can get! He seems ok apart from being quite underweight, & is being force fed herring four times a day (being very wary of his formidable beak!).
Gannets are beautiful birds, stunning when they have their adult plumage, pure white, with black on the wings, a cream-coloured head with fantastic, piercingly blue eyes. This one is very young, although almost fully grown but has none of the adult plumage yet, he is a dark grey, almost black with hundreds of tiny white spots all over & he doesn’t yet have blue eyes. I find it absolutely amazing how the plumage on birds changes depending on their age. Gannets don’t get their beautiful adult colouring until their fourth year. When young, they leave the nest at around thirteen weeks old & just ‘fall’ into the sea from their cliff-side hatching site. They spend the next month just floating around on the sea before they actually fly. I would think that this one hasn’t been flying for long & is only a few months old.
Birds such as these, which should spend all their life at sea & never come inland, often suffer fatal lung infections when they spend any length of time in an inland environment & it therefore vital that we move him on to a coastal area as soon as possible. We are hoping to get him to the RSPCA’s wildlife unit near Taunton within the next few days, where he can continue his rehabilitation & be released as soon as he is fit enough.
Last night we had a call-out to an RTA deer near Pershore. It was a huge female fallow deer weighing around 70kgs! Luckily she had no serious injuries but was obviously suffering from concussion & shock & was unable to stand. She received treatment for this back at the Hospital & has spent the night under an infrared heat light in our Large Mammal Shed. This morning she is up & about & will be assessed later today to see if she has recovered enough to go back where she came from this evening. Transporting a fully-awake adult fallow is not going to be anywhere as easy as it was when she was semi-conscious last night!! Should be fun!!

Tuesday 25 September 2007 at Vale Wildlife

At Vale Wildlife, we get used to the RSPCA turning up with ‘unusual’ animals for us to look after. We will often take in exotic reptiles or birds such as parrots which are found as strays, and we will board them for a while until the RSPCA find a permanent home for them. At the moment we have a Burmese python as well as a corn snake. But this morning one of the Ambulance Collection Officers turned up with two rather more unwelcome ‘guests’ - well that was certainly my personal opinion as I am an extreme arachnophobic!!! Yes, you’ve guessed it - spiders!
Two spiders had been found inside a car which had been imported from Texas, USA. We were not certain what the first one was, but we think that it was one of the many species of Huntsman spider which live throughout the world. Huntsman spiders have been brought in to us on several occassions over the years and although mildly venomous, they pose no real threat to humans. We usually manage to rehome spiders such as this to wildlife parks or zoos which have insect houses.
The second one was a bit more worrying - a large, female Southern Black Widow spider! Even though I am petrified of spiders, I have to admit that (through the glass tank!!!) she was quite beautiful with her large, glossy body and bright red hourglass shape underneath her abdomen, but the knowledge that she carries a powerful neurotoxic venom in her bite was enough to make me ensure that there was no way the lid of the tank was going to come off!!
Thankfully, they were not in our care for long and they have now gone off to a safe home with someone who has much more knowledge and experience of creatures such as these.
I have posted two photos in the Gallery of our Forum which can be found at www.vwr.org.uk as photos posted on the Blog are never of very good quality. The Black Widow picture is a stock photo from Wikipedia as all the ones we took this morning were out of focus! The Huntsman photo is ours.