“This is the best birthday present ever,” my daughter Isabelle said when she came home to find two days-old squirrels curled up in a fish bowl on the kitchen counter.
They weren’t planned as gifts. It just so happened that it was her 27th birthday when they entered our lives. I found one on the sidewalk outside my midtown Toronto home while walking my dogs. My neighbour, Marion, found the second one next to her car a day later.
The pink, furless creatures were so new, their ears were still fused to the side of their heads and their eyes had not yet opened. I tucked the first one under some shrubs in hopes that the mama would return. She never did and so we brought them inside.
We called around to wildlife centres but they were all at capacity. A call to the city yielded an offer to “dispose of them.” We found that unpalatable. Besides, by that point we had already fallen in love and were determined to give them a chance to survive.
We knew there was a fine for keeping wildlife in Ontario, but we had no intention of raising these squirrels as pets. The plan was to release them back into the neighbourhood as soon as they were old enough — if we could keep them alive.
