After reading the thread where hag saved the baby snakes when their mother was injured, I thought that it would be fun to start a “rescue” thread. I am sure that almost everyone has a little story about a rescue of some kind.
One of my best involves a “sweet” little mouse that I rescued a few years back. This story also helps explain why my wife thinks I am nuts. It was fall and I had just finished harvesting honey from my bees, and I had the empty supers (hive bodies) stacked in the garage for a few days. I was moving them outside to let the bees clean the remaining honey out of them, and when I lifted the bottom one there was a puddle of honey on the floor, and stuck in the middle (flat on his side) was a white footed mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus). The floor was cold, about 50f (10C) and the mouse was as cold as the floor and appeared dead. I picked it up by the tail and took it outside and was about to toss it into the weeds, when it gave out the tiniest little squeak. I thought well if this guy is still alive (it was a guy), I should try to save him. Now, you have to understand that at this time of the year I usually fill the garage with rat poison packets specifically to eliminate these little invaders, but now that had become completely irrelevant, so the rescue proceeded. The first thing I had to do was get the honey off of him, so I took him up to my bathroom and cleaned him by running warm water over him. The warm water began to revive him, but he still looked like a drowned rat (more or less), so I was using the hair dryer to dry him off , when my wife walked in and asked what I was doing, so I patiently explained to her why I was blow-drying a mouse. She never said a word, just shook her head and walked out. He was getting pretty frisky by then, so I put him into a five gallon pail with some paper towels for the night. By morning he was zooming around like nothing had ever happened, so I took him out and let him go, where I assume he lived a long and happy mouse life. Pretty amazing that he could recover from being that cold, after being stuck to the floor for what could have been days.