Donna, it truly is amazing sometimes how these birds can manage to beat the odds, especially without our help! Sue, I'm in N.E. Ohio. I know, I'm jealous of her. I don't think I'll be having that many birds any time soon! Just not my kind of luck. 2/5 eggs have hatched. Tomorrow is day 14. Hopefully I awake to the remaining 3 hatched! But for some reason, there are MORE HOSP juvies flying around, and I've only caught like 1 in the past couple days! RRGH! Wish I had a good BB gun! Why aren't they going into the DRST with the rest? ~Tim~

Thank you, sjerin and everyone who has said such nice things. About the yogurt. It is in one of the Bayou Tales...I will eventually post it here...but one of the first possums I got had metabolic bone disorder. I called a possum expert in California and consulted with her on what to do. She told me to mix a portion of all kinds of chopped vegetables with a portion of Purina Cat Chow....had to be that brand...stir it together with enough yogurt to moisten it. I hand fed the possum for weeks and she never got any better and eventually died. I found out though that all possums love yogurt...most animals do. And I started giving them all some, since it is a good source of calcium and they have high calcium requirements. The possum...well "opossum yahoo group" wouldn't let me join, but I became good friends with one of their members. If any of you ever received one of my possum Christmas cards, she designed them. She truly loved her possums...had just one at a time, but one was quite elderly....they have short life spans...at 4 yrs. old and she even took it to an acupuncturist to relieve her arthritic pains. Anyway, she was telling me about a possum she was helping rehab and they couldn't get him to take the medicine they had for him. Their method was to take one of those little Baskin Robbins Ice Cream sample spoons and try to give him the medicine from that. I told her....that's not going to work. Under the best of circumstances, possums will gape their mouths open. It is a common behavior...even tame possums will do it....it is a response to show their teeth and growl, feign they are ferocious...if that doesn't work and they can't escape, they may play dead, or even bite you. Anyway, the way to give possums medicine, you mix it in a little yogurt. They eat every bit of it. (So see, I could have taught the experts something.) :-)) I like giving it to little possums because it is very filling and even fattening. They are much less likely to chew on each other if they are full and sleepy. I have never had a possum develop metabolic bone disorder, out of the hundreds that I have raised. Meanwhile, back at the possum yahoo group, the original possum expert...the one who taught the one that I had the phone conference with...a vet in Orange County, California, who spent 17 years studying possums, died. The possums group was beside themselves because Purina changed the regular cat chow recipe in some way, and now they were afraid to use it any more. Some of them decided not to ever feed meat based foods to their possums ever again. It made me so glad that I wasn't a member of the group. I am sure I would have made many enemies because don't tell me that an animal with 50 razor sharp, triangular teeth should not eat meat. People who can't figure out simple things like that....get on my nerves. So I am not a member of their group but I am going along without them. ;) No. I don't get any vacations. In a way I don't mind because I have traveled quite a bit...but there are a few places I'd love to go again...mostly east of the Mississippi. If my husband is home, I can go like to the iris convention for Louisiana irises in Lafayette, La. It is just three days. I haven't been in awhile but would like to go next year to see my old friends. I really don't mind staying home....I love it here. I have a million things to do...I don't ever get bored. Sometimes I get sleepy though. We do plan to do some work on the place, as soon as my husband can get back to work. If I was better set up to take care of all the animals...chickens, horses, possums, pigs...it would be a lot easier. My husband was very sick with a UTI about two weeks ago. I didn't sleep well because every time he woke up, I woke up, and he was so very sick and it was so stressful, and I felt so run down when he finally did get well. I am just now getting my strength back. I felt so wrung out. But I am much better now. I am glad you enjoy hearing about the animals. I don't think my rehab group likes us talking about them because it is their fear that someone will think they make good pets, but I always tell people, they aren't good pets, but I think by writing about them, it helps some people to understand them a little better.

"Another downside is squirrels raised by humans become very attached to them..." When I was a kid my father's friend's dog came home with a baby squirrel. My father took it and we raised it. He lived as a pet in our house. He'd sit on the back of chairs when we sat in them, he ate a window sill or two. He was actually a great little pet. My father made a good sized cage for him that was in the house. Eventually he moved the cage outside and we'd put him in there at night or when we didn't want him loose in the house (it was summer). Then we started leaving the door to the cage open during the day. He'd stick close to the house but always would come back to use if we called and at night. He eventually spent less and less time with us but would still come up to us. Eventually he just blended in with the other squirrels. Good luck raising the little guy.

I raise a lot of baby possums every year. I raised my smallest ever this year. He had little hair, except a shadow down his back. His mouth wasn't still fused tho. He almost died several times...like when I brought him home, he was ice cold, and then he got off the heating pad and got under it and got so hot that he almost died, and it did kill his siblings. He was near death. I plunged him into some tepid water, and got his temp down. I knew he would die too, but he didn't, and is a big guy now. Right now I am raising 12 baby possums and two kittens. One kitten is off the bottle and the other one could be, but he still wants to nurse, so I indulge him. :) At least all of my baby possums are off the tube now, and eating on their own.