FEED ME!
Cages, boxes, pens and pools are rapidly filling up with babies of all shapes and sizes at HART Wildlife Rescue, in Overton. A newly hatched little chick soon grew into a greenfinch. There are baby robins, doves and pigeons, ducklings and moorhens through to a rather raucous young crow. Nearly all of them require hourly hand feeds.
“Most small birds will thrive on a mixture of raw minced beef and dried egg food, mixed to a paste with water and additional vitamin supplements,” says June Gibbs. “The tiny ones however are fed on chopped wax worms, the larvae of the wax moth, which is very high in protein.”
The crow family have a higher proportion of meat in their mix, while the pigeons and doves need to be tube fed with a ‘glop’ made from chick crumbs and water with extra vitamins.
Then there are several baby rabbits and squirrels demanding bottle feeding. It requires a lot of forward planning to ensure that there are plentiful supplies of food to suit the various diets.
Milk replacer for baby mammals also varies according to the species. Most babies, including bats, are fed on kitten rearing milk replacer, while the canines like fox cubs get puppy rearing milk.
Young rabbits are fed kitten rearing milk but at a much richer ratio to other mammals. In the wild, a doe has extremely rich milk, high in fat and protein and only feeds her young once in 24 hours, so instead of a 1:3 solution, our rabbits get their milk at 1:1.
Open our fridges and you will find a multitude of jars and bottles. Each is carefully labelled as to its contents and the recipient.
The three little fox cubs that were brought in during March thrived and once they began feeding independently were moved to a centre in the West Country. They will be released at the end of August.
“While still only a couple of weeks old, they gained celebrity status, appearing in the local and national papers and on TV,” June added. “Rearing them was not easy, but seeing them now as three fit, healthy youngsters makes all the hard work worthwhile.”
If you’d like to see film of the cubs, visit our website www.hartwildlife.org.uk and click on ‘news’.
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