We have managed to help keep this puppy alive but she sure seems like she wants to die. She has just enough strength to nurse but the other puppies are so much larger and stronger than her now, that she has a difficult time staying latched on long enough to get the nutrition that she needs. I have spent a lot of time making sure that she gets a lot of time nursing and bottle feeding her but I just don’t know if it will be enough. She’s just not gettng over the hump. Several times today I thought we were going to lose her but she has managed to pull through each time.
I was excited that the concrete guys were out today prepping one of the bays of the shop. Unfortunately, when they were removing some of the pit run with the skid steer they collapsed a section of ABS drain pipe. I had warned him a couple days ago that the drain line was shallow and that they shouldn’t drive over it with any equipment but apparently, it wasn’t remembered or explained well enough, so a repair is now necessary.
The boys and I were out working in the shop when we found three baby birds that must have been blown out of their nest in last nights storm. Only one of the three was still alive and they scooped it up and cradled it in their hands.
When it pitched back its head and opened its mouth while sitting in their cupped hands, they rushed to find a worm. The worm was small but still too large for the tiny chick. It did hungrily accept a smaller piece of the worm. Its translucent skin allowed us to watch the dark worm slide down its throat and disappear into its body.
We tried to get a view of its nest behind the basketball backboard on the shop but the was no way to access it. As a last resort, Drake deposited the sparrow chick into a robin’s nest in our front yard where one of three eggs have hatched.
They were happy to report this evening that the rescued sparrow chick seemed right at home in its new foster family.
As I was putting our little struggling puppy back with her mom tonight I noticed one of the other pups had a cut on her left flank, leaving a pretty good-sized gap that allowed me to see her ribs and a smaller parallel cut slightly further back. So far this has not been an easy litter. Sammi may have bitten her but it they seem more like the result of being stepped on. If I took her to the vet for stitches in the morning I’m afraid they would have said that the tissue was too dried out to attempt to close the wound or they would have to freshen the edges by trimming it. I pulled out my canine first aid kit to take inventory of the suture kits that I have. All of them are much larger than what I needed for this puppy but I didn’t have anything smaller. After figuring out how to swaddle the puppy successfully in a towel I managed to close the largest wound with two stitches. I really wish I’d had a smaller-diameter thread as well as a smaller needle for the size of stitches that were needed in this case. The size of needle and thread they used on my finger would have been much more appropriate.
This litter needs to start going a lot smoother so that I can stop the odd hour routine and get caught up on my sleep.