Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

September 17, 2009

Ph34r t3h cut3 0n3s

Filed under: Gallery,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 9:27 am

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.

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September 16, 2009

It’s official!

Filed under: Personal,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 11:09 pm

I managed to get into the office a bit early this morning, which meant that I also got to leave a bit early (working as a federal contractor definitely has its perks).  The only reason I mention this is because I beat K to the mail and when I reached into the mailbox, there was a rather thick envelope with the non-profit’s name (C/O me).  It was from the IRS.  Well, the only thing that we have out-standing with the feds is our non-profit status.  So, I was a bit nervous in opening it.  It felt a bit like opening a college application letter.  I was really hoping that, like with the college letter, a thick envelop was a good sign.  After all, if you’ve been turned down, they send you a one page letter.  If you’ve been accepted, they send you a packet of information.

I opened the envelop, and sure enough, it was a two page letter saying that the Triangle Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic is now an official non-profit and it included a lovely pamphlet with information on our responsibilities as such.

Also nice – our status is retroactive to the end of *last* year.  So all of the donations that we’ve received are officially tax deductible.  As are any future donations if anyone wants to donate 🙂

Go TWRC!

July 9, 2009

Back from Galts Gulch

Filed under: Personal,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 11:22 am

Yes, because I’m a mighty industrialist (aka Ubermensch) and the world will fall down if I stop writing. ;-)  Okay, enough picking on the Randians.  Sorry for the radio silence.  A quick update:

I got back from Des Moines last month and the next day had a board meeting for the non-profit I work with.  As treasurer, I went to review the financial situation based on the projections we finally received.  Sure enough, the detailed projections were in line with the back-of-a-napkin ones that I had presented earlier, i.e., dire.  The only real solution was to close a significant portion of our operations, which we did.  Unfortunately, that was also the part of operations that K cares most about.

So for the past three weeks, I’ve been working with some other folks, including another board member who resigned after closing operations, to form a new non-profit.  It’s been a little hush-hush, but we did go public today.  We’ve sent out a press release, have a web site, are doing the twitter thing, and even have a facebook page.  Yes, the last two make me feel dirty, but what the hell.

My part’s been largely working the administrative angles with K.  I’m the Board Secretary, so I’ve filed the incorporation paperwork and will be sending off the IRS Form 1023 this weekend in order to get our official tax-exempt status.  We got word yesterday that we were incorporated on July 7th!  (BTW, it’s very cool that information goes online at the NC Secretary of State faster than it goes out in snail mail.)

My colleagues are working with their friends on the branding, etc.  Hopefully we’ll be announcing a coming out party soon.

So, you see, I wasn’t really hangin’ with Galt – I’ve just been working on things I couldn’t be public about until now 🙂

April 21, 2009

William Wallace on wildlife releases

Filed under: Gallery,Photography,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 12:30 am

They may take our rehabilitation bins, but they’ll never take… our FREEDOM!

On Sunday, K release some baby water turtles that she had been over-wintering.  Fortunately, we’re all of a mile from a good place at which to release turtles, Jordan Lake, so we didn’t have to drive too far.

The big one in the image set is a male (note the long nails for better, um, gripping) slider and the other three are painted turtles (you can see the orange on the underside of the shells in the images in the gallery).

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Links take you to the full set.  Oh, and for those wanting to take pictures of fish or reptiles in water, circular polarizers rock. :-)  I do wish I had a better depth of field on some of the images, but it was a cloudy day, I needed the speed and I don’t like using an ISO greater than 800.

October 16, 2008

Wildlife rehab porn

Filed under: Photography,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 8:50 am

It’s okay to look, I promise that there are no shots of me doing naked cage construction. *shudder*

A couple of months ago, K got a call about a squirrel.  When the folks brought it over, it turned out to be rather small, but pretty far along in its development.  Well, that’s because it was a flying squirrel.  They tend to be a lot smaller, a lot sweeter and just darn cute.  Because they live in colonies, K found someone with another flying squirrel and has been raising them together.  They just recently went outside, so hopefully they’ll be releasable before winter.  Here are some of the pictures from when they were still inside.

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A few more pictures at the gallery site.

May 5, 2008

If you love something, set it free . . .

Filed under: Gallery,Personal,Photography,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 9:58 pm

About a year and a half ago (November 2006), the wildlife clinic K volunteers with transfered a water turtle (yellow bellied slider) to her. A cute little guy, just over 7 grams and about the size of a quarter. Yesterday, weighing in at 125 g and with a shell about 4 inches long, we released her into the nearby lake. It’s easy to fall for a lot of the animals K rehabs. Their cute and tiny or just plain helpless and on the mend, but the turtles are particularly hard because K keeps them for so long. The following are a handful of the pictures we’ve taken of the turtle:

  • the first 6 pictures were taken in August 2007 when she was about 16 grams
  • the second 9 were taken in January 2008 when she was 25g and we were trying to tempt her into eating by giving her meal worms
  • the next 6 were taken yesterday before the release – 125g and big enough to defend herself
  • the last 3 were taken at the release in Jordan Lake

Good luck little turtle

April 21, 2008

Baby opossum pictures

Filed under: Gallery,Photography,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 8:10 pm

When it rains it pours. A month into spring and K hadn’t received any calls about rehabilitating animals until today when she got two. The first was about baby bunnies. K doesn’t take baby rabbits because too many of the stories end with “and then they died.” For example, “I was rehabbing some bunnies in the spare room, the dogs barked, the rabbits got scared and then they died;” or “I successfully rehabbed the bunnies, but they got stressed out while I was releasing them, they stroked out and then they died.” You get the idea. The other call was for a litter of opossums whose mother had died. She took those.

Since the new version of WordPress has a gallery feature, I thought I would take some pictures at the most recent feeding and see how the gallery worked.

January 27, 2008

Possum pictures

Filed under: Personal,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 10:48 pm

Back in August I wrote about a rehab possum that K was taking care of – she was very much a cutie.  I was looking through some pictures on the camera and realized that I had a few more of her.  Now that she’s all grown up and has been released, I thought folks might like to see them:

Here she was back in August:

A month later, in September:

And then after she had been outside and right before release in December:

  

The last two were from the night we started leaving the outdoor cage open so that she could leave when she wanted to.  It took her a bit before she left.  Hopefully she’s doing well.

August 21, 2007

are you my mommy?

Filed under: Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 8:28 pm

you are my mommy

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Three or four weeks ago, K received a call about a baby possum. It seemed that the mother had died and the finders could only locate this one baby. They brought it to the house and K’s been raising it ever since. Apparently, she’s doing a good job. She (the possum, not K) started off at 23g and is now around 80g. The picture above is her clinging to K while sleeping. Note, this is not good rehab practice, but an individual baby possum is a lonely animal.  🙁  Fortunately, the possum should “re-wild” as it grows up.

In her more active times, she’s crawling around all over the place, including the top of her aquarium:

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July 9, 2007

More possum cuteness

Filed under: Photography,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 10:09 pm

So K’s possums got a big brother recently:

dsc_1900.JPG The whole family.  Note the little sores on the small one?  That’s where their whiskers are coming in.

dsc_1906.JPG Here’s the biggest one by himself.  He needs a bit more enrichment, so he gets to hang out with us on occassion.

dsc_1904.JPG I didn’t quite capture the possum tongue, but he was licking me.  Very cute 🙂

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