A day in the life of Rufus

You've met Rufus before. That was him on his mum's back in the previous blog entry. Unfortunately, his mum didn't survive. Whether it was from her injuries, or shock, we don't know, but little Rufus is now an orphan.

It's just something that you have to accept as a carer. As I've mentioned before in this blog, about forty per cent of birds coming into care don't survive, and that was also the case with the noisy miner from the previous post.

The noisy miner should really have been left where it was. We discovered that it was able to fly a little, so if the person that found it had just left it alone (keeping pets away of course), it would have most likely survived.

Anyway, we now have Rufus to look after and he's as cute as a button. Actually I've never been able to figure out what's cute about buttons, but there you go. Rufus is cuter than a button.

Below, I present to you, a day in the life of Rufus (actually it was only about ten minutes, it was feeding time).



Is it time to get up already?




I'll just have a quick read of all the important news.




Breakfast, or is it dinner? Hard to tell with nocturnal animals.




Some joeys start to lap their milk at an early age, luckily Rufus is one of them.




Oh, how about a bit of privacy.

If you're curious what Donna is up to in that last picture, when the joeys are in the pouch their mum licks them after feeding to get them to go to the toilet. A damp tissue is a suitable substitute.

For more pics of Rufus have a look at Donna's blog.

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Just a little note while we're on the topic of possums. I've mentioned this before and I'm going to continue to mention it, a lot of the hits on this blog are from people googling for information on looking after native animals. If you have a wild animal that you're looking after, make sure you're part of a wildlife carers organisation.

Do not try to look after wild animals if you don't know what you're doing, or don't have some kind of support network. It's not like looking after cats, dog, budgies or guinea pigs.

You can't learn it from a book or from the internet. There are some very good, very informative websites out there on caring for wildlife, but when you come across a problem with your animal, and you will, an experienced carer will usually be able to help you fix it straight away.

Rufus is a good example of the need for a network. Ringtails really need to be with their own kind as they're a lot more social than brushtails. Rufus will most likely end up with another carer from BARN that has a ringtail the same age and size as him.