Wild Pets

[Wilma]

Empty Nest's account of their pet mallard duck in the How Does Your Garden Grow? thread has prompted me to ask for more stories of wild animals that have been taken in and raised.  I know from experience that these animals can become a big part of your family.  While my girls were growing up, we always had wild animals and birds that we were raising.  I drew the line at snakes.  I won't relate all our experiences but the baby coons might have been our biggest challenge.

My folks had a family of coons in their barn.  The mother had been killed, either accidentally or by design, I don't remember which.  After her death it was discovered that there were babies in the barn.  They weren't exactly accessible, but my husband managed to dig them out.  I think there were about 6 of them.  Of course they had to go home with us to be taken care of.  One of them had lost part of a leg and the bare bone was showing.  We took that one to a vet in Eureka.  He fixed up the leg, didn't charge us a dime for his services and we took the baby home.  The babies grew and became quite active.  We let them stay outside as they stayed around where they were fed.  They got so they would climb the tree that hung over the house, drop off to the roof and become stranded.  Couldn't get back in the tree and it was too far to drop to the ground.  We solved that by leaning a long board, probably a 2 by 6, against the roof so they could slide down.  I have pictures of them on the board.

They finally got too big to keep around in town.  My husband talked to his co-workers at Beech and one of them took the little cripple.  She lived a good many years.  We gave one other away and then one person took the rest of them.  I could tell stories all day about the wild animals and birds that we raised.  This is just one of them.  Tell us your story.

[flo]

Did you see the story and plea of the guy in Wichita whose wallaby had gotten away?  The wallaby baby was found and returned to him, unharmed, then he was ticketed for having the animal in his home and will have to appear in court.

[Wilma]

Yes, I think that there has been laws since the days that we kept wild animals and Severy was a much different place than Wichita.  Even, tho, I don't think you can raise wild birds or animals without a permit from the state now.

[kdfrawg]

There was a woman named Marie that had a restaurant in De Soto for years. She was an odd duck, and reportedly treated her employees badly, but was a marvelous cook. She kept exotic animals on her farm, including a lion. I wonder if you have to have a permit for an animal that exotic...

[frawin]

I found a nest of baby Racoons in Guy Denton's barn and kept 2 of them and raised them on a bottle. They were Sammie and Susie, the male Sammie was always pretty calm and would crawl upon my shoulder and set there the female, Susie was was more cantankerous (as the female is of other species). When they were grown I took them down along the Creek behind where I lived and turned them loose, later an old gentlemen  that had been on the creek fishing stopped to tell me what he thought was an unbelievable story, "he was setting on the bank fishing and two coons came right up to him and one of them sat right on his lap". He was really scared at first but soon realized they meant no harm and had obviously been someone's pets. I vowed then not to take anymore wild animal babies as pets because they will not survive in the wild if you turn them loose later. I remember that Mcintyres had a pet Bobcat and Darrel Vinette had a pet Coyote, Gladys Denton had pet Skunks and Charlie Van Buskirk had a pet Squirrel, I used to feed and play with. My brother Wes had some Mustangs over the years, and while the had ugly heads and were not the prettiest of horses they did gentle down and make good pets and they were tougher than boot leather.
Frank

[Diane Amberg]

 The early summer of 1955, my neighbor from the farm across the road, came and got us one morning to look at a bird she had found sitting at the base of one of her tall front yard trees.  There we found a little ball of white fluff with a hooked beak.  We looked all around assuming he had fallen from his home above.  We looked for the parents and left him alone until almost dark, but we saw no adults birds, of any species, showing any interest in him.  I knew he wouldn't survive the night, too many cats and critters around, so I took him home.  Mom thought he might be a baby owl, but we weren't sure.  She tried to convince me that he wouldn't survive, but I was determined to try.  We read up on raising baby birds, and one of my friends loaned us a pigeon box to keep him in.  My sister and I took turns feeding him bits of earthworm, chopped crickets, grasshoppers and canned dog food.  He thrived. As he started getting bigger and got his adult feathers, he turned out to be a little male sparrow hawk.  We named him Henry.  As he got older, we started putting him on our shoulder and he would ride around flapping his wings to exercise them.  We finally blocked off a section of our old chicken house, so he could sit on the chicken roosts and flap around a bit.  By now we had added bits of fish, liver and egg to his diet and started dragging around grasshoppers tied to a thread for him to "catch.'' He would pounce on them from the porch rail or our shoulders. On day in late summer he was riding around on my shoulder when he suddenly took off and flew up in the tree by the kitchen door.  He never came back down to me again, but continued to "catch" what ever we would put out for him. He started flying from that tree to a huge old tulip poplar in the field behind our house.  It was an extremely old tree and had lots of bird apartments in it. As he flew around, he would screech and sail as he learned the details of flying. School started once again, and every day when we came home we asked if Mom had seen Henry.  Usually she had.   One chilly fall day we realized he was gone.  No Henry.  We thought something had happened to him.  We were sad, but were pleased that we had successfully raised him and had given him a chance.

But I'm not quite finished. The following spring, on a beautiful May Saturday afternoon, we were out in the garden, when we suddenly heard screeching high over head. We looked up to see a little hawk cartwheeling across the sky, screeching and swooping down between the house and the old tulip poplar tree. We walked up to the tree by the back door and sure enough, there sat Henry, and he wasn't alone!  He had a little female with him. They sat in the tree for a few minutes and then flew down to the tuilp poplar and set up house keeping. They sucessfully raised a family that we would see from time to time, as they were out catching bugs. For many years, Henry would announce his arrival each May. I never knew for sure when it stopped being Henry and began being Henry Jr., but his offsping are there to this day. 

[Wilma]

How nice that Henry came home to live.  Is it common for a freed wild pet to stay in the habitat it was freed in, I wonder.  If so, maybe I could see some of the critters we have freed over the years again.

[flo]

Shortly before I moved to Howard I was sitting at my computer and heard a tapping on the window.  Thinking somebody was trying to get my attention, I looked up and the prettiest bright green and red bird was walking back and forth on the sill, pecking at the window, trying to get in or fighting his reflection in the glass, I don't know which.  I didn't know what to do because that particular window was "painted" shut.  A few minutes later it flew into a nearby tree.  I got a cage, done everything I could think of to catch him, knowing he had to be someone's pet that had escaped.  No way could I catch him, nor could I after that get him to fly into the house.  I did get a picture of him (or her) out in the road eating grain that had fell from a truck going by, and if I do it right it will be attached to this post.  If not, you get the general idea.  It stayed around for a couple weeks then one day he just didn't show up anymore and have often wondered if someone captured him, if he was killed by some bigger bird, and just where did it go.  - - - well, can't access my "kodak" file from here for some reason, so no picture.  By it's size, and to my thinking it was too big to be a parakeet and too small to be a parrot.  The body was bright green and the head and front of it's chest was red.