Had a 16.5 hour day today! I am exhausted. But very satisfied. I went into work and got a call about an otter that we were going to euthanize at first and decided to do a rescue on instead. She was really sick. She survived the rescue, and transport, but when they got her to the Sea Life center she died during treatment.

In these situations I drive from the town I work in to another town about an hour away to meet the team who does the treatment. So, I handed this otter off, picked up a frozen carcass (an otter-cicle, if you will) and headed home. At around 8:30 I got a phone call about another otter that was stranded on the beach with a big group of people around it. This one just happened to be on the beach in a tiny town I had just passed through. So I turned around and drove down to the beach. Once I was there I droved the truck right to it, I was trying to use the truck to break up the crowd some.

This otter was just a pup, maybe 10 weeks old, a little girl, probably not even eating solid food yet. She was HOT. You could see the heat rising from her body, and her little flippers were hot to the touch. She was almost totally unresponsive, she was in real trouble. I took off my jacket and wrapped her up in and had a bystander hold her in the truck and we went to my house, grabbed a kennel and I bought a bag of ice and put it all over her and around the kennel to cool her off. Its the coolest thing, when you give a sea otter ice, they eat it, they have to be REALLY sick to refuse it, even the one that died earlier today was munching ice from me. This one didnt even acknowledge it.

So, I made another road trip! This time we had a much better outcome. When the team met me the gave her some pedialyte and took her temp, which was almost normal after all that icing. After the fluids she perked up a lot. Scratched one of the animal husbandry guys, seeing that fight come back in them is just great!

I got home at about 12:30 in the morning, I decided that I would take the work truck back in the morning, and the otter-cicle isnt going to get any deader. So long day, but Im still smiling!

I guess I gave the wrong finger to the wrong man...