Life at the shelter has been super busy the last few weeks, if you're in the PAL discord you'll probably of heard me talk about the rescue babies that come through. Most of the time the mother has been hit by a car or killed by hunters so we take in the orphans and raise them up either till they're ready to be set free or until they're healthy enough to move on to another carer and be socialized.

It depends entirely on the animal how long we will keep them for. Kangaroos for example are a pack animal and they need to learn to be with a family, if you group them together as they grow (preferably groups of 3 or more) they will slowly start making their way off the property and into the bush, becoming independent.
A wombat however is a solitary animal and if you put them together, no matter how sweet and cuddly and playful they are as babies, they will end up fighting and hurting each other. In the wild one wombat will sometimes just kick another out of their burrow rather than digging their own.

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In the last few weeks we have had 6 baby kangaroos a baby wombat an echidna, a cockatoo, a dove(yes boring i know) a sugar glider, and a simpsons python (lil snek). I'm going to put up a picture of some of these animals but they wont be the ones we currently have. I've stated the rules they have regarding us running a rescue before but basically the rescue animals can't be used for profit. Fair in theory but I believe its more directed at using them as zoo animals or as attractions, here I simply want to introduce them to everybody. Plus if we really want to calculate the costs of hand-raising baby animals for months at a time against what i'll make on a Steemit post, well, lets just say the price of Steem would need to be a few thousand times what it currently is...

What the babies are like.

When kangaroos and wombats are born they are tiny, I mean jelly-bean size, and hairless. Actually kind of ugly.
Unfortunately if we get one this size there isn't anything we can do without its mother, plus the chances of finding it are minimal, a pouch check involves sticking your hand into the dead mothers pouch and feeling around for a baby gently, if they're that size its easy to miss, and most people don't bother checking.

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Yes, that is a baby kangaroo.

We have had a few pinkies come through but much more fully formed than this, the smaller the harder they are to keep alive. Once they have fur they're usually doing pretty well, we recently lost one of the kangaroos we were raising after having him for 6 weeks. He was just growing hair and had just come out of his pouch when we noticed something wrong. I wrote more about him in an earlier post, Dobby.

The 2 baby roos with us right now are both hairy and almost ready to move on to a larger group. We have one who needs to put on some weight first and another who needs to calm a bit, she only came in last night but she's a decent size. approximately like this

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We also had the cutest little sugar glider but we didn't have him around for long, he had been attacked by something (we think a cat) and had small tears on his wing that needed stitching which was, difficult for the vet at best.

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I really wish I could post more pictures of our actual animals, I plan on doing a walkthrough video of our place and I may not be able to help it if I capture them on video a little bit ¯_(ツ)_/¯.