Magic moments

Late one summer I was cleaning up the area where the hay sat all winter and this meant lifting pallets and forking the old hay into a barrow to dispose of.? It’s one of those jobs that gets put off for a while. Partly because in Scotland it’ not always that clear when winter ends, no joke…it was snowing in the Cairngorms a couple of days ago…but also as long as it’s made ready for the following winter its not an urgent job.?

This time however, I got slightly more than I bargained for. I’d pulled up the wooden pallet that the bale had been sitting on and was busily forking up the hay when a large lump went flying through the air. It landed with a thud and I gasped in horror when I realised I’d forked up a hedgehog. I managed to pick her up and inspected her, luckily I hadn’t actually pronged her, but when I went to look at the bit I’d disturbed there was a nest and four baby hedgehogs only a few days old.? I’d complete uncovered their nest and as by then pretty much all of the hay had been scooped up I knew I couldn’t leave them there so I grabbed mum and the babies and popped them in a box, wondering what on earth I was going to do with them.

I remembered that the vet practice had an advert on their noticeboard from a woman who lived along the coast and she looked after injured and sick heggies and other wildlife so I called the vets and got her number. We organised for me to take the mum and babies through to her and we sat for hours talking all about the animals and birds that she had looked after.? I knew they would be in safe hands.? But, I hadn’t realised that when you disturb a nest of hedgehogs, that can trigger the mother into killing the babies, and she did, three of them, but she didn’t just kill them, she ate them.? By the time the Hedgehog lady found them there was just one male left and she made the decision to separate mum and baby and to hand rear the hoglet herself.? Next day I went and picked up the mum and took her back to the field and let her go.

I got regular updates on the wee boy and he grew up, and started to get huffy and a bit aggressive and the time had come to pick him up and release him.? Hedgehogs are quite remarkable.? They don’t tend to imprint like some other mammals and take to being released easily especially if there is a good food source, which you can provide if you want to keep them around, although there are no guarantees.

And that’s how it started.? Hedgehog lady gave me training on raising heggies, I picked up the book on dealing with sick, injured and juvenile hogs and with a vet practice on hand that treated wildlife for free, I took over hedgehog rescue in the area. I would get calls from the SSPCA inspector often late at night telling me he was on his way with ‘something’ for me and some times it would be hedgehogs, but more often it would be birds.? Please bring me a fox or a badger not fucking birds I would tell him.? Not because I don’t like birds, I love them, but far from being Snow White when it comes to birds I am more like the angel of death when.?

One night he brought three that had been bouncing around in the back of the van for a few hours.? One bird that I wasn’t able to identify and two blackbird nestlings. I was clueless and again found myself on the phone to hedgehog lady who was doing her best to retire from wild animal care.? In the morning two of the birds had died but one of the nestlings had survived but was in bad shape. He went onto the heat pad and I opened a tray of dogfood with crushed biscuits in it…well I wasn’t going to be regurgitating any worms and by some miracle he survived and thrived.? At night he would be in a cage in my bedroom and as he grew I would close the curtains and let him fly around the room. I’d be sitting on my computer and he’d sit by my hand. Then he started to object going into the cage and instead preferred to roost over night on the book case and I knew the day was coming that I’d have to release him.? I never had any problems releasing hedgehogs.? Even hand-reared ones.? They are pretty smelly, you don’t really handle them much and I often released them into pretty safe environments.? But this little bird was different.? I opted to release at the place where I kept my horses as I thought at least I am there daily and you know, if it doesn’t work out then maybe I can just catch him again and well he might be a ‘pet’ after all.

I took the cage to the back of the stable that bordered a thick woodland and tentatively opened the hatch. He popped up on the top of the cage and then onto my shoulder, then he was on the stable roof.? Part of me hoped he wouldn’t go but I kept telling myself that he was wild and my bit was done.? I put the cage back in the car and left, bawling my eyes out.

For the next three days when I went to feed the horses I would call and all of a sudden he would appear, come and get his mealworms and then fly off again. ?Day four there was no sign of him, nor day five or six or beyond.? About three weeks after release I heard a bird land in the bush next to me.? It was a young blackbird, it looked like him but he stayed a few feet away and eventually took off, and I never saw him again.

And then there was Tawny.?

I was at a horse competition when SSPCA inspector appeared in his little van (his wife was competing that day) and he said oh Mandeigh, hoped I would bump into you, do you want to do an owl.? He opened the back door and there in a tiny cage was a rather battered tawny owl. He told me that it had a torn eyelid and thought it had been hit by a car.? So I took him home and inspected him.? We thought initially that the eyelid would knit itself but the next day I wasn’t happy with it and organised with the vets to get it stitched. He might not survive the anaesthetic they warned me but we had to give it a try and a few hours later he was awake and ready to come home. They were more concerned that he wasn’t able to hold his head up and thought he may have a neurological problem.? But I had a bigger problem.? If I wasn’t going to be regurgitating worms for the blackbird I sure as heck wasn’t going to be out catching mice for this guy.? He took a bit of cooked chicken from me and I put out a call for help on social media and instantly got a response from a friend who said I could get frozen mice from the pet shop that sold reptiles but in the meantime she would give me some frozen day old chicks that she fed to her hawk.

I think I can say that was the most unpleasant experience I have ever had.? After the chick had thawed I quite literally had to pull it apart offering the owl a leg or a bit of wing, but of course his favourite bit was always the head.? He would hold the dismembered body part in a claw until I left and then would tuck in.?

The eyelid healed.? His neck straightened up. But the eye went cloudy and I knew that without binocular vision his hunting ability would be seriously compromise. Release was not going to be possible.?? But I only had a small cage and as he got better and better it was obvious that to keep him in such a small enclosure would be a lifetime of misery.? Then one day as I was cleaning him out I did the usual, which was to sit him on the back of the bench…well he only went and took off.? A couple of flaps of his wings and he was airborne. He kind of crash landed into a bush and I quickly retrieved him, but I knew I’d have to find new accommodation for him.? I called the girl who had given me the chicks and as luck would have it, she had just built a new aviary for her hawk and the old aviary which was huge, was now vacant. ??He lived for about three years in his new home.? A wild tawny would come to visit and sit on the top of the aviary at night and he ‘hunted’ for his own chicks until one day he just expired.

Its hard to describe the feeling of looking after a wild animal that trusts you implicitly and then one day can just walk or fly away without a second glance.? You know that they owe you nothing. It would be very easy to let your ego run away and feel some kind of saviour complex. But it’s the other way round. To have been able to have these experiences, makes you feel so grateful and in reality we owe them everything for these moments.