There's an animal in trouble...

We've had a few encounters with animals in trouble lately. Greyson loves the show Wonderpets and likes to watch the little baby animals get rescued. Unfortunately not all of our recent run-ins went so well.

First, I heard the story of Grey finding a dead frog on the playground at school and bringing it to his teacher. I think she yelped pretty good, and he talked about the dead frog for days.

Then, Greyson was helping me check the mail one day. He likes to open the mail box, reach in, grab a piece of mail, give it to me, and close the box. There were many envelopes in the box so we had to keep repeating the process until we got to the last letter. Greyson reached in, and came up with a lizard dangling by the tail. I admit I yelped pretty loudly myself, did a little dance, and then giggled at our spectacle on the front porch. That lizard suffered the same fate as the frog - he must have starved when he couldn't escape the mailbox. Where were the Wonderpets then?!

Finally, we were at the park one Sunday feeding the ducks, walking through the grass on our way to the bridge when Mike heard little cries for help and noticed a baby squirrel on the ground. We must have stepped on, rolled over, other otherwise disturbed him because he was making quite a racket once we passed. We stood there unsure for a moment, discouraging the ibis from pecking at him but afraid to reach out and claim responsibility. I dread situations like this, because I'm an animal lover but not sure what the right thing to do is... especially with little Greyson in tow. Do we set the squirrel somewhere safer, out of traffic but possibly risk contaminating him with our scent? Do we take the squirrel to a vet, who will probably not want to deal with him? Do we take the squirrel home, to raise or rescue or ???

Thankfully, as all of these thoughts swirled through my head, we noticed an adult squirrel coming down out of the nearest tree, just a few feet away and probably where the baby had fallen from. For a moment I thought it was just after our bread but eventually it circled the baby squirrel closer and closer and picked him up and carried him to safety (or so I like to believe). A real live animal rescue, how often do you see that?

G is still talking about the baby squirrel he saw in the park, and I'm still singing the theme to Wonderpets.