yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Cute Squirrels Get a Second Chance At Life in This Rehab Center | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

A lot of times people ask the question, "Well, why are you rehabbing a squirrel? It's a road, and there's tons of them. What's one less?"

Well, squirrels play an important part in the whole ecosystem. They are prey animals, so they help feed a lot of the other animals that are here, and they help with the propagation of different types of plants because they bury seeds and nuts. It's an important life. It's not a decision that I like to make to euthanize an animal just because they are a squirrel or a rabbit. They have every right, just like people have every right, to live here and to be a part of nature.

Some of the many ways that squirrels end up here are due to... they're either found on the ground, they're found by pets, people cut down trees, and so the nest falls down on the ground. So they come into us, and we assess them here. If they're really small, we will feed them formula with a syringe, and we care for them by toileting them because they're unable to toilet themselves.

Then we move them through the phases in different-sized cages and offer them different foods. In the end, we put them outside where they learn to be a squirrel outside. When we come in and feed here, we don't talk to any of them because we're trying to get them back habituated into the wild. Apples for the squirrels! After about a week outside, we go ahead and release them back into the wild.

Right now, we have a little over 110 squirrels here on the property. All the squirrels that we have here are called fox squirrels. We do have, I think, one melanistic squirrel, meaning that it is a fox squirrel but it's all black, and that is just a genetic thing that happens one in every 100 births.

We name squirrels here because it's easier for us to identify them. That's Noodle! Hi, Noodle! To go by a number, like 1, 2, 3, really doesn't tell me much about the animal. But if the animal is named George, I know who George is, and especially if he has any issues. All someone has to do is mention, "Hey, George is doing much better today," or "George is not doing better today." It's much easier for all of us to really know the animals in the facility.

Antibiotics, pain meds for a week, and then we'll put her down. Recheck one week? Okay, sounds good.

These guys require a lot of time, a lot of skill. They require hours and hours of work, and so it's a true dedication. Sometimes for me, I feel like I'm running out of energy, but all I got to do is take a look at one of these cuties, and I'm ready to go again. [Music]

More Articles

View All
Helicopter Physics Series - #5 Autorotation = NO PARACHUTE! - Smarter Every Day 50
Hey, it’s me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. We’re right in the middle of a series on helicopters, and we’re gonna talk to you about… What is this called? (son) Parachute. A parachute. So, in airplanes, the pilot can have a parachute so if an…
The greenhouse effect | Physics | Khan Academy
Our Earth’s surface temperature is somewhere close to 15° C—nice, cozy, and warm for us living beings. But what keeps us so warm? Well, my instinctive answer is that it’s the sun, right? But it actually gets more interesting. Our atmosphere has these gase…
This Disease is Deadlier Than The Plague
Hello, Steve here. Today I am moving over as the voice of Kurzgesagt for something really special. Our dearest friend John Green would like to tell you a story that’s very close to his heart. So, let’s hear it from him directly. Hey, John! Hey, Steve. T…
Charlie Munger's 6 Secrets for a Successful Life
And another thing that people do, like bear guard is amazing, is they build these enormous mausoleums. I think they figure they want people to walk by that mausoleum and say, “Gosh, I wish I were in there.” Let me tell you another story that I think is a…
I’m SHOCKED at how much YouTube paid me for a VIRAL VIDEO...
What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here! So, two things: number one, we just had our first video break 1 million views in one week on one video. Just to give you guys some context here, usually my channel does anywhere from 850,000 to about 1.1 million views…
A Place for Cheetahs | National Geographic
The last thing we want to do is lose this cat after a long journey and all this effort and all the permitting and everything that’s gone into getting him here. Yeah, and if you’ve got a dart gun, right, running full here into this fence. So these are four…