Katie stayed up with our baby skunk all night long. She fed her, wiped her when she pottied, cuddled her, sang to her, and made sure she didn’t climb out of the box and hurt herself. We think it is a girl. Kelsey has named her Itachi Chii Sai, Small Skunk in Japanese. Chi Chi for short. I was relieved to see that she was alive and well this morning. She was moving around and making squeaking sounds when I first saw her in Katie’s arms this morning.
Katie fed her diluted milk with an eye dropper. She said she had to feed her every 2 hours.
I took my turn and held her while I watched Kim Clement’s concert from Israel. Then Patrick took over and held and fed and did all the things that need to be done for a newborn through the afternoon.
Patrick calls her Skunky, but he says her full name is “Mephitis Skunky Mephitis”, the scientific name. I found out that this name came from a noxious exhalation from the earth, and it was also the name of the goddess of these exhalations!
That is a fitting name for the odor that skunks are known for.
Skunk belly! Have you ever been lower than a skunk’s belly? 🙂
I’m going to put up this video even though it doesn’t have sound. My camera speaker has stopped working. 🙁 But this shows Patrick taking care of Mephitis (Chi Chi). He checked the milk to make sure it wasn’t too hot, then fed her with the eye dropper, then wiped the milk mustache off of her face. 🙂 He was really good with her.
See how cute she was and why we fell in love with her.
Watch this:
And you can see that we found a use for some of our mismatched socks! We used hot pads that we could heat up by boiling and then click a little metal thing inside to heat them up again when they cooled off. We did all we could to take the best care of her. She seemed pretty healthy up until she was taken to the Wildlife Center.
A friend is coming to pick her up tomorrow and take her to a Wildlife Center. We will be sad to see her go. I told my friend that we will have a going away party before she takes Chi Chi away. We only had her for two days, but we still managed to get very attached to her. Several of us spent a good bit of time holding her and taking care of her. So tomorrow will probably be kind of hard. But we are thankful that we had this chance to care for and save the life of one of God’s little creatures.
Update: Our friend said that they put her in an incubator as soon as she took Chi Chi into them. They gave her a paper that said we could email them and get 2 updates on the skunk. I emailed them and they told me they tested her for rabies but the tests came back negative. That would be a relief if we had been worried about it. We want to go to the Wildlife Center for a field trip sometime. My friend said it was really neat. But the paper said that we would not be allowed to visit our skunk. That was kind of sad, but I’m glad that she is being taken care of.
"Oh that God would give every mother a vision of the glory and splendor of the work that is given to her when a babe is placed in her bosom to be nursed and trained! Could she have but one glimpse in to the future of that life as it reaches on into eternity; could she look into its soul to see its possibilities; could she be made to understand her own personal responsibility for the training of this child, for the development of its life, and for its destiny,--she would see that in all God's world there is no other work so noble and so worthy of her best powers, and she would commit to no other's hands the sacred and holy trust given to her." -JR Miller
