Now that we’ve got the feeding routine pretty much down, I don’t think it’s necessary for me to try to report in after each one (not that I was always successful at that anyway!). Instead, I’ll just start reporting things that (I hope) are more noteworthy. 🙂

But first, here are a couple of pics of me feeding my charges. The first one is the largest and oldest male, who has both his eyes fully open:

They’re not always such neat little eaters—table manners are not so big in the squirrel world, I’m guessing:

I was a little worried yesterday about the guy who had been sucked on. He didn’t eat much and he seemed just a tiny bit lethargic. So of course I got up in the middle of the night to check on him, only to discover him doing quite fine (but only after waking all the others up at the same time…Sigh.)

Fortunately, that continued throughout the day today. He ate a lot and did his fair share of pooping (a good sign). One of his eyes has also started to open slightly, which is actually unusual for someone his size (about 65g). Normally that doesn’t happen until they’re closer to 100g. But that isn’t the only thing that he seems to be ahead of schedule for—let’s just say that lethargy is not really a concern anymore. To wit:

My coordinator, June, tells me it’s really unusual for them to be climbing before their eyes are open. But, surprisingly, his sister did the same thing a little later. Maybe they just really want to get away from me. After all, it sure looks like he’s smelling freedom here:

Of course, as soon I stopped worrying about the one, another got me a bit concerned. It’s one of the girls this time. Actually, I didn’t really think there was a problem. What happened was, in my second-to-last feeding with her, she started making some different noises than their typical grunts. Now, one of the signs of pneumonia is that they start making a clicking noise from their lungs, but I’ve never actually heard what it sounds like. So of course I worried that that was what I was hearing. But I called June and she was kind enough to actually make the noise herself over the phone, and I was pretty sure that was not what I heard. But I checked on her again about an hour later just to be sure and all seems well. New mother jitters I guess. 🙂

11:10 p.m.: Well, things certainly come up quickly. During the last feeding, I was excited because the one guy’s eye is now fully open. But then when I finished feeding the girl that I had been worried might have pneumonia, I was was wiping her mouth only to discover blood on the cotton ball. I couldn’t see any kind of obvious wound, so I called June again to find out what I should do. After talking it through, we think the most likely cause was a small nick somewhere, probably caused by one of the other guys’ claws, which are getting a lot sharper as they get bigger. And if that’s the case, all we can do is watch her and see what happens. I did that after we finished the call, and there were no more signs of blood, so I’m hoping that was the case. The other—less likely—scenario is internal bleeding from the original fall and if that was the case, there would be absolutely nothing we could do. But she’s not showing any other signs of distress and the blood wasn’t that much, so hopefully it really is a long shot.

Oh, and after all that? That’s when my computer decided to crash and I’ve just spent the last hour trying to get it to work again. Sigh.