Well, I found a squirrel.
I was riding my bike along N.C. 54 to the law school last week when I saw a cute little squirrel by the sidewalk trying to move.
I hoped off the bike to see what was going on and found the little critter with its back legs not seeming to work quite right. I took some pictures and used a stick (careful not to get too close – potential rabies) to lift the little fella a little farther from the road.
Coming to check on him during my lunch break I found him still there, trying to gain traction in the leaves, unable to climb a tree, and no mommy or daddy squirrel in sight.
So I decided to check online into some local wildlife rehabilitators and that if the squirrel was still there after classes, he was coming along with me.
After my final lesson of the day, Property, I grabbed a cardboard box and some paper towels and made a little nest for “John.” I’ve heard that possession is 9/10ths of the law. I presume that applies for squirrels.
“Squirrel” was my nickname at the The Shelby Star newspaper, given to me by Chief Hamrick of Shelby Fire, for my energetic work photographing a fire scene a few years back – running all over the place, shooting the scene from every angle.
As I remember, I drew up such a fervor I was having a hard time using the viewfinder on my camera through the sweat.
Anyways, if I’m named Squirrel, I figured the squirrel should get me name -- John.
So John grabbed onto a stick and I hoisted him into his box and we rode my bike back to my apartment, where I put a bottle of hot water in there to help keep him warm.
One of the wildlife rehabilitation websites said to do that. The site also had some numbers for local rehabbers. I called some and left some messages.
Waiting for them to call me back I carried John around in his box – I figured I couldn’t leave him alone and I wanted to be ready to take him to a rehabber if one called back.
And I figured that a paralyzed squirrel gave me little danger of a Mississippi Squirrel Revival revival….
Folks thought John was really cute.
I never thought of keeping him as a pet – I just wanted to find him a good home. But I had a friend back in college who kept a squirrel for a while. By his telling, he snuck up on it from behind one day on campus and grabbed a hold of him… kept it in his dorm room… named it “Squirrel”….
Anyway, it just so happened that my church was having it’s periodic “Blessing of the Animals” service – meet outside, sing some cute kiddie songs about animals, talk about Francis of Assisi, try to keep all the dogs from fighting, priest goes around blessing the critters… afterwards we have veggie burgers (ok, so I had a veggie burger)….
Last time I went, I took Kip, one of my hermit crabs. He was named after the day I got him – Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. My hermies were actually in the local paper’s cutline for their photo of the event….
And the next day Kip was dead.
I love him, but that priest is never doing any baptisms/weddings/confirmations for me…..
At the church I managed to get on the phone with a rehabilitator over in Apex…. We arranged to meet at a Target over there and I started driving.
I met the lady and an accomplice of hers in the parking lot. Some onlooker might have though we exchanging drugs or something, but really it was just a little paralyzed squirrel being shifted from my box to hers. She reached into my cardboard carton bare-handed with considerable more bravery than I had yet mustered with the little critter.
I was thinking for a second that maybe I had been a bit paranoid about the bitey little fellow.
Then he bit her and I felt a whole lot righter.
She said that John’s gimpy legs were a result of being bitten by something, he was in pain, and they’d take him to some hospital where they’d do what they could, but they might wind up doing the humane thing.
I think my church may now be two for two on my animals.
Maybe that’s just what you get for biting her. I dunno, didn’t try it for m’self.
She said that squirrels having rabies was just a myth. But I’ve been given the understanding that the belief that it’s just a myth that squirrels can get rabies is itself a myth.
See, most of the time when a small mammal like a squirrel or a mouse gets bitten badly enough to get rabies it’s killed by the bite itself.
But in this case we’d already ascertained that this one had survived the bite, at least for a little while.
I know a little about rabies, or at least I did a few years ago. I worked at a paper where I covered a some stories dealing with animals. And rabies. And rabid animals. Heck, we even joked that I was on the “rabid possum” desk at the paper.
Not exactly sure how that looks on a resume….
Sure hope I didn’t give the wildlife rehabilitator rabies….
