Hotel life - Week 4 (Critter rescue day)

  

I thought I would have little to write about this week. We haven't discovered anything new or done much different this week, but today seemed to be a day of rescues. This morning, my husband and I went out to get breakfast. We usually have cereal in our hotel room, but we felt like changing it up a little this morning. I guess it was meant to be. As we entered the parking lot, I saw a few gulls in the parking lots--there are usually flocks of them in every parking lot in this area of town. One in particular ended up standing out to me--it looked like its wing was broken quite badly. It definitely couldn't fly. We even tried to toss it a bit of our food, but the gulls that can fly were able to swoop in and eat it before this poor one could run over to get it. 

I called our local wildlife rehab hotline and left a message. They say they check messages frequently but that they don't open until 9am, so I wasn't sure what time they'd be able to call back and arrange for someone to come out to help me get this bird. I decided to put out a request on a bird Facebook group I'm a member of, just to see if someone could maybe help catch the bird and get it to an emergency vet where it could be examined and held until the rehab place opens up. Someone was indeed able to come and help! This person has caught many injured birds before to help them, and surprisingly, it didn't end up taking us that long to catch this bird, and the person who helped drove the bird to the rehab place, which was open by the time the ordeal was over. It felt really good helping. I don't know what will become of this bird, but I figured at least if it can't be healed, it will be humanely euthanised rather than suffering by starving to death in the parking lot or getting run over because it's too weak to get out of the way in time of an oncoming vehicle.

Then later, when we went out for lunch, I spotted this poor dragonfly stuck in a puddle. It was still moving, but losing strength, trying to get out of the water, it seemed. I put my shoe near it, and it suddenly clung on for dear life! I walked carefully over to the grass--they have strong grip, and I couldn't shake it off me!--and brushed my shoe on the grass. It came off and just sat there. I didn't see it after, so I'm hoping it was just waterlogged, needing to be dried off, and didn't die and it was just camouflaged to where I couldn't see it.

Meanwhile we are one step closer to departing. Our passports will arrive on Monday, so we're really excited about that because we can finally take the next step before we can finally apply to be approved to travel. It will all work out in the end, but it's quite slow with all the pandemic delays!