Napping Babies or Orphaned Critters?

By Pat Gibson

Every spring you hear tales of folks picking up fawns or little rabbits or baby birds and attempting to raise them. The baby critters usually don't make it. What a lot of folks don't realize is mother animals hide those babies for long periods of time. The Good Lord taught those mothers that a predator will follow her and the baby is safer hidden and sleeping. Baby animals are a lot like human babies, they need lots of sleep. That fawn you found curled in the deep grass or standing under a bush is not abandoned but hidden or left napping by a watchful mommy.

Baby rabbits are a different story sometimes. The cottontail will make a nest in a shallow hollow often right out in the open. The bunnies will be covered with grass and left sleeping and still most of the day. The mother rabbit will return to feed the bunnies two or three times a day. The problem comes when the lawn mower uncovers the bunnies before their eyes are open and they can run. Then the location of the nest is exposed to the family cat or dog and no more bunnies. This can be emotionally upsetting for the children of the family or a soft hearted adult.

A word of warning, cottontail babies are almost impossible to raise. Some folks have succeeded. (I got one bunny almost to releasing size and the cat ate him. The cat enjoyed it but I cried a lot.) They have been known to drop dead from shock or fright. They have to be fed a special baby animal formula with an eye dropper about every two to three hours around the clock. The folks at Wildlife Rescue don't like to get bunnies and advise against attempting to raise them unless they are pretty good sized, as in fully furred and eating grass.

Now baby birds have a lot of myths surrounding them. Mother birds will not abandon the babies if you put them back in the nest, if they need to be back in the nest. If she just threw it out so it would learn to fly, she may fly off in disgust. The only babies that really need to be put back in the nest are the ones that don't have any or very few feathers. Handle them gently because they are very fragile. If the nest has been destroyed by the wind or a cat, a small box or a platform with the nesting material will help the parent birds set up housekeeping more quickly.

Some kinds of baby critters need more protection than others because there just aren't very many of them. Some critters have so many that you wonder why we aren't over run with them, but that's another story.

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