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It’s time to look again on 2021! Examine our weblog between Christmas and New Yr’s for quite a lot of tales and reminiscences of 2021 from the employees and volunteers of the Wildlife Middle of Virginia.
That is in all probability dishonest as a result of it’s so current, however I needed to share a second that appears small however feels personally important to me. A lot of the time in wildlife rehabilitation, we work with sufferers with appreciable trauma or who’re extraordinarily emaciated or critically debilitated. Sadly, we regularly see circumstances go south regardless of our greatest efforts at medical therapy and care. We often have what really feel like medical failures, although letting go of a affected person is often the kindest consequence for that animal. The sphere will be fraught with loads of emotional fatigue and burnout. For these causes, I typically discover myself making probably the most out of each little factor that goes proper, and celebrating every small victory as a hit.
We admit bat sufferers for quite a lot of causes: typically for trauma, typically for being juveniles who shouldn’t fairly be on their very own simply but, typically for being trapped in individuals’s houses. One current affected person was a male Massive Brown Bat (Eptesicus fuscus) that we admitted in early December after being present in somebody’s attic. Presently of 12 months, Massive Brown Bats are beginning to hibernate, and he could have simply settled in an inconvenient spot. Bats generally is a difficult affected person in rehab as a result of they are often fairly confused, will be troublesome to deal with medically, and have a tendency to not eat properly in captivity. Sometimes, with bats, we hand-feed them mealworms till they’ve realized to eat on their very own on this unnatural setting. Fortunately, this affected person was a champ at consuming! Hand-feeding him (with forceps) every evening was my favourite solution to decompress and wind down every day. Getting a bat (or any affected person, actually) to eat might sound small, however seems like such a rewarding feat, particularly in the event that they’ve been inappetant for some time, or it’s a medically difficult case. Consuming implies that they’re feeling properly sufficient to maintain going! For those who’ve by no means seen a bat gorging himself on mealworms, it’s one among life’s most satisfying experiences.
— Dr. Jenn Yu, Veterinary Intern
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