Last night, I realized that K had quite a few baby animals around the house and that I hadn’t posted any pictures. So, without further ado, may I present the cute ones:
The first picture is of a young opossum. He and his siblings were in one of our outdoor enclosures, but he didn’t seem to be doing too well, so he’s back inside for a bit.
The next set is a group of baby (week old) snapping turtles – note the remnants of the yolk sack. This is sort of an interesting story. The old non-profit had a snapper that died. However, we knew that the turtle had eggs. So we sent the body over to the vet school’s turtle team where they extracted and incubated her eggs until they hatched in August. These are the her babies.
The other mammal in the set is the baby (3-5 week old) flying squirrel. Some people called up K when their cat found the squirrel out of the nest. The little guy is doing well, in spite of the great Esbilac debacle.
The last set of pictures were taken last night. K has a friend who is also into turtles (let’s call her J). Between K & J, they probably have more turtle husbandry experience than any other two people in the area. J is heading out of town and wanted K turtle-sit for some of her more critical patients. When she came over Tuesday night, she also brought over an incubator with two turtle eggs. There had been 3 eggs, but one had just hatched (second picture in the group), so who knew when the others would hatch. Apparently yesterday. They were still working their way out of their shells when I got home, so there you have it – baby turtles emerging from their shells.
Too cute.