In the beginning......

To tell their stories and bring you up to speed to the present day.....bear with me while I give you a little background on my raccoon family.

My first year rehabilitating wildlife was 2006. I poured my heart and soul (and ALL my free time, and then some!) into 25 orphaned baby squirrels and 10 very special baby raccoons. It was just me and a lotta babies that needed bottle feedings throughout the day! I still don't know how I did it all! I was quite overwhelmed and decided for that reason, as well as the fact that most of the rehabbers in my area wouldn't deal with raccoons, to focus mostly on them for the following years.

So anyhoooo.....Spring 2006....first came 2 two week old little girls. Mom had the nest in a chimney. The homeowner realized mom didn't seem to be coming back so after 2 days she brought them to me. One already had her dark stripe on her face, the other was still pale. So Stripe & Paleface settled in. (Unfortunately Stripe failed to thrive. Her eyes never opened when they should have -Paleface's opened w/o a problem - and about 1.5 weeks after her eyes should have opened she died suddenly with no signs of a cause or illness. The fact that she was slower to develop lends to a failure to thrive which can be a common syndrome. Still a terrible blow for me!)

About 2 weeks later came a litter of 5 that were only about 2 weeks old! A man took them out of his attic. It is unknown what happened (or what he did) to the mom. He brought them to a pet store and dumped them on an employee. Luckily she cared enough to search out a rehabber and thus my 5 new kids....4 girls (the quads) Ringer, Brownie, Whitey & Belle, and 1 runty male, Blondie.

Next was Lexi. She came from a home in Lexington & was about 6 weeks old. Mom had moved her 5 siblings to a new nest but never came back for the last one.

And finally we have a litter of 3 babies found huddled together on the center yellow line in the middle of a road late one cold, rainy evening. They were about 5 weeks old....2 girls and a boy! One girl sucked down her bottles eagerly.....Hoover. The boy just sat there and gaped like a baby bird waiting for me to squirt the milk in his mouth....Gaper. The second girl did a little of both, so she was in the middle.....Nel Mezzo (in the middle in Italian).

These were the first 10 kids I would raise then release into the wild approximately 5 months after taking them in.