Ozzy on Autumnwatch

I don't know how many of you watch Autumnwatch Unsprung, but if you were watching last night you would have seen Ozzy the skunk live on national TV. We arrived at the studios about two & a half hours before we went on (don't quite know why we had to be so early) & everyone wanted to see her so she spent all that time lapping up all the attention. She behaved impecably......until Kate Humble asked to hold her when we were live. She promptly pooped all over Kate! That is why they say you should never work with children or animals. I think that is the end of Ozzy's TV career!

Otter cub progress

Becoming attached to a wildlife casualty is not supposed to happen, & most of the time we manage this just fine. But ocassionally, along comes an animal which just gets to you. Our little otter cub is one of those heartbreakers.

When he first came in he seemed to be fit & well. For the first week he made brilliant progress, no problems with feeding him, he put on loads of weight & went from 860gms on arrival to over 1300gms a week later.

Then it all started to go wrong, he started to lose weight, developed diarrhoea & started vomiting. Blood tests revealed that he had a bacterial infection so swabs were sent off to find out which antibiotic was needed to combat this. While we waited for the results, we started him on antibiotics anyway. So far all the test results have been negative although we are still waiting for some, but little otter cub deteriorated rapidly over the next few days, just fading in front of us despite all the many treatments we were administering to try to help him through.

A week later, he is still with us but still not good. He is on 2 different antibiotics, fluids & anti-sickness drugs & it is just so frustrating as we just don't know what else we can do.

Yes, this job can be extremely rewarding....but sometimes it can break your heart too!

How's this for cuteness??

Today's helping of the aaah factor is brought to you by this gorgeous, six week old otter cub. He was brought in a few days ago by the RSPCA after being found out alone near Worcester. He is perfectly healthy & is feeding really well - being bottle fed every 4 hours during the day & the tiny needles that he has for teeth have started to get through small pieces of trout (as well as my fingers ocassionally!)

Our dilemma is, what do we do with him now? The longer he stays with us, without others of his own kind to interact with, the more risk there is that he will become imprinted on people & will then be unreleasable. Our aim when dealing with any animal, for whatever reason, is to ultimately return it to its natural habitat. Therefore, our next task is to contact other wildlife centres to find out if anyone has otter cubs of a similar age that this little one can be with, so that he begins to realise that he is an otter.