It was actually pretty amazing seeing the place where the raccoons went. The woman who took them had over 30 raccoons. She had an inside room for the smallest ones, and a room for the medium ones where she begins weaning them off their bottles and transitioning over to solid food. May and June are the busy raccoon season. Eventually they get big enough to go outside into the taller than human sized caged in living spaces.

She had bottles for them when we got there. I told her we could stay and help feed them if she wanted. I truly can’t imagine having that many raccoons to take care of. They drank their bottles and then had to go into a much smaller space than they’d been in before. I wanted to take them back. The woman who trained her has been raising raccoons for 30 years and is 83 years old. She has other animals too but raccoons are her favorite.

People really do have their gifts. The woman we brought the fawn too had five or six other fawns. She also had several owls and a fox. The deer had likely fallen into the lake and was swimming in circles when my daughter first noticed it. She and a friend kayaked out and made a V from behind where they guided it over to a side where there was shore. When it didn’t not stand up itself and get out, she picked it up and set it on the trail.

It’s hard to know when to intervene with animals. You can think you’re helping when in fact you’re making things worse. One woman I called recommended bringing it back to the other side of the lake where mom would be much more likely to find it. The other woman I talked to understood that but was also concerned about possible aspiration and subsequent pneumonia after being in the water. For that it would need antibiotics.

I decided to take her to the woman with the antibiotics. There was also a noticeable bump on its head that I did not examine super closely. The fawn ended up having a fractured skull with the bump being a puncture wound mostly likely from a coyote. After being in the water the deer had slept for a while, was awake and even alert for a while, ad then slept most of the ride there. They were very nice people and I was glad we had taken her.