Squirrel and bat news

I've got a bunch of things to write about, so I'm going to break them up a bit into several posts.

In non-raccoon wild animal news:
The squirrel that I got last week has moved on to another rehabber. I was pretty happy to hand him over to Stephanie last Thursday. While he was as cute as a button and fun to rehab for a couple of days, I couldn't keep rehabbing him because 1) I don't have the best cages for squirrels, and 2) I don't have any more friends for him to partner up with.

However, I *did* take a bunch of pictures of him before I passed him along:



( More squirrel pictures behind the cut! )

In other news, a bat at Great Smoky Mountains National Park tested positive for White Nose Syndrome (WNS). WNS is a fungus that forms on the faces of bats. It was discovered a couple of years up in the northeast, and has killed hundreds of thousands of bats up there. We've been hoping it wouldn't spread, but given the migratory patterns of some bats, it was inevitable. With this new discovery of an infected Tennessee bat, it's almost certainly going to hit Georgia in a couple of months, if it hasn't already. Biologists still haven't been able to figure out what causes the fungus. It's awful. I've been dreading it coming here because WNS has really put a dent in the bat population up north and it's really affected the ecosystem. I'm hoping the bat biologists who are working on WNS (and there are A BUNCH), figure it out quickly and find a way to eradicate the disease without eradicating the bats. :-/

Five newborn raccoons!

On Friday, I picked up five newborn raccoons from Cobb County Animal Control. The mother was trapped in someone's attic and released outside, leaving the babies behind. Thankfully, the homeowners brought them into animal control, and a rehabber who works there contacted me. The raccoons are currently about a week old and weigh 125 grams, measuring about 4 inches long. They're so tiny! They're in that so-ugly-they're-cute stage: their eyes and ears are fully closed, and they're pretty awkward creatures, as you'll see in the video below. I think these are the youngest raccoons I've rehabbed. Thankfully, they're all healthy and in great shape - I don't expect to have any problems with them. In a couple more weeks, they'll look more like raccoons and have fine motor skills down pat. Until then, they're just balls of awkwardness:
Four of them:


And a video of their awkwardness:

They look just as awkward as I felt in middle school.