Its a beautiful rainy day! The weather is cool and reasonable (which is has NOT been lately). We took in three older deer last week that people had had for awhile and they would ONLY drink from baby bottles....human baby bottles. Since each deer drinks 4 bottles at a feeding and I had 2 little baby bottles, its been a serious effort to feed them each time!!! I FINALLY have them on the big bottles like all the rest of the deer. (They drink 2 big bottles each, but I have TONS of the big bottles so I dont have to stand out in the pen with them kicking at me while I refill little bottles 10 times!!!) Wheew!! BIG progress! In fact, two of them can get themselves on the new bottles so in another day, when Im sure about it, Ill move them in with the general population in the other pen. Theyll have tons more room and tons more friends!!! The last deer can drink from the bottle, but only if I open his mouth and put him on the bottle. So he cant go next door until he can do it himself. It has taken me longer to feed these three than the 16 next door!! And another new bottle drinker is Beep Beep!!! He came to us with a very painful mouth/nose infection that hed had for 3 weeks. It had gotten so bad that he had to drink from a bowl. Weve had him on antibiotics since the day he got here and the pain is gone. The black layer of skin had peeled right off his nose and was bleeding. And milk is extremely painful on open wounds. So even drinking from a bowl was quite painful for him. He now has a couple of dark areas on his nose where the black is trying to come back. The pain is gone to the point where he was able to actually drink from a bottle again last night! Whoo-hoo! Weve been able to track his pain levels by how much formula he drinks (since it hurt to dip his nose in the bowl, hed only drink until the pain was worse than his hunger level). And hes been taking more and more formula and has recently hit a visible growth spurt now that he has all the food he wants! (He looked super tiny next to Kyla in the photo, so youll have to trust me that hes put on solid weight AND has grown visibly taller in the past week!) I have had 7 others in the rehab room that all had to have their bottles individually hand held for various reasons. So feeding the inside deer was taking 3 times as long as all the outside deer! Several of those have learned how to get on the bottle by themselves which means I can just hold bottles and the deer can come up and get them. I can now feed 3 deer at a time back there.....cutting the feeding time inside down by 2/3rds!! This may or may not sound exciting but to someone with SO many things to do each day, speeding up the overall feeding time is a HUGE plus! LOL! And, of course, it also means that each deer is progressing forward in their journey to freedom!! Now I have to get back to running another load of laundry. It still takes ALL DAY of running that poor washer to attempt to keep up with the rate that they mess up the laundry!! Someday, we will get those other 2 washers hooked up. Sadly, our progress on that project has not kept up with the rate that the deer are coming in. BTW, we have another fawn en route as I type! So Id better get off here and get back to work so Im ready when it arrives! LOL!
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 15:34:14 +0000
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