Northwoods Wildlife Orphanage

04/11/2026

03/28/2026

That damage in your yard has an owner. Location plus pattern plus timing tells you the species.

🌿 Shallow cone-shaped holes in the lawn, two to three inches wide:
- Dozens of small holes appearing overnight in fall — skunks digging for grubs. They peel turf back in neat patches
- Scattered holes with torn-up grass — raccoons after the same grubs but messier and more destructive

🌿 Bark stripped from tree trunks:
- Clean vertical strips of bark peeled off two to five feet up — eastern gray squirrel storing bark fiber or accessing cambium in late winter
- Horizontal rows of small square holes in neat lines — yellow-bellied sapsucker drilling sap wells. The holes refill with sap that hummingbirds also feed from

🌿 Tunnels and raised ridges across the lawn:
- Soft raised trails just under the surface, no visible entry hole — eastern mole hunting earthworms and grubs six to ten inches deep
- Golf-ball-sized holes with fan-shaped dirt mounds — voles entering and exiting shallow tunnel systems through the grass layer

🌿 Garden plants chewed overnight:
- Clean angled cuts on stems, low to the ground, with small round droppings nearby — cottontail rabbit
- Ragged torn edges on leaves and hostas with a slime trail — slugs and snails, not wildlife
- Tops of flowers and vegetable plants browsed above three feet — white-tailed deer. They lack upper front teeth and tear rather than cut

🌿 Dug-up bulbs and buried seeds:
- Shallow scattered digging across flower beds in fall — squirrels caching or recovering nuts and acorns
- Bulbs pulled from the ground with bite marks — chipmunks targeting tulip and crocus bulbs from below through short tunnels

🌿 Bird feeder damage:
- Feeder knocked down and bent open overnight — raccoon. They can open latches, unscrew tops, and lift weighted perches
- Seed scattered on the ground in a wide circle — squirrel shaking or hanging upside down from the feeder
- Suet cage pulled apart or dragged away — opossum or raccoon working the cage from the mounting pole

🌿 Quick rules:
- Neat damage with a pattern — an animal that visits the same spot repeatedly. Squirrels, sapsuckers, and moles are creatures of habit
- Messy destruction with no clear pattern — raccoon or skunk on a single overnight raid
- Clean cuts on plants — rabbit or deer. Insects leave ragged holes and chewed edges
- Any digging concentrated in one section of lawn — grub infestation underneath. The wildlife is the symptom, not the cause
- Damage that appears only at night and is gone by morning — the animal is nocturnal. Raccoons, skunks, opossums, and deer all forage after dark

Most yard damage peaks in early fall when animals cache food and in late spring when they feed young 🌿

03/28/2026

Right now — in a hollow tree, under a deck, inside a chimney, or in the insulation of your attic — a raccoon is lying in the dark with four newborns pressed against her belly. She gave birth in the first week of March. She has not left since.

The kits weigh about two ounces. Their eyes are sealed shut. Their ears are folded flat. They can't walk or stand. They wiggle toward warmth and the sound of her breathing. They nurse every few hours around the clock, and she licks each one to stimulate digestion — without that stimulation, their systems don't function on their own yet.

The male mated with her in late January and left. He plays no role in parenting. No food. No protection. No presence. She gestated alone. She found the den alone. She gave birth alone. She is raising them alone.

She won't leave the den for the first two to three weeks. She survives on stored fat and loses weight. When she finally does leave — briefly — she seals the entrance with bedding material and listens from outside for distress calls before walking away.

At three weeks their eyes open. They see her face for the first time. At six weeks they can walk. At eight weeks she brings them outside the den for the first time — at night, one by one, carrying them by the scruff.

Then the education begins. She teaches them what to eat, where water is, how to climb, and how to navigate the neighborhood. They stay with her until the following spring. Nearly a year of solo parenting.

🐾 If she's in your attic or chimney:

- Don't seal the entry point — her kits are inside and can't survive without her. Closing the gap separates the family and creates a worse problem than the one you're solving
- Don't use smoke, ammonia, or loud noise to drive her out. She won't abandon the kits. She'll move deeper into the space
- A one-way excluder door installed by a wildlife professional works, but only after the kits are mobile — roughly eight weeks from birth
- The earliest safe exclusion window is mid-May. Before that the kits can't follow her out
- Once excluded and the entry sealed, she'll find a natural den for next year. The solution is permanent if the gap is properly closed

She chose your attic because it's the safest den in the neighborhood. She's been alone with them in the dark for two weeks. She has ten more months to go 🌿

03/19/2026

In case you are wondering .... we got smucked good by the Ides of March Blizzard. Still digging out.

01/07/2026

Please stop feeding corn to deer in the winter. Their digestion changes seasonally and they cannot digest corn in the winter. If you feed corn, you are actually starving them.

04/15/2025

Please, if you find a bird, NEVER put water in its mouth. The small hole you see at the back of the tongue is its airway. If you get a drop in its mouth, it will inhale and choke. They can't cough the water up, and it's a horrible d£ath.

Baby birds get all their moisture from the food their parents give them. If you find a dehydrated adult bird, offer it water to drink on its own, or you can dip a cotton swab in water and clean a small part of its beak, avoiding the nostrils. If you find a baby bird, keep it warm. If they don't have full feathers, they need a soft heat source. They can't produce their own body heat.

NEVER feed a cold bird. Their digestive system shuts down when they're cold, and this also more often results in the bird slowly dy!ng. 🐥🐣