‘Oops!’ She suddenly exclaimed. ‘I don’t think I meant to do that. I think I’ve just de-pom-pommed him!’
It was true. Despite her best attempts at trimming the surgical site, the clippers had caught and in one movement my surgical skills were no longer required.
‘Well, I guess that decides what technique I’m going to use!’ I studied the wound where moments before the testicles had been. Remarkably, there was virtually no blood. It had been a clean cut.
‘I’m sorry, Jon, I feel terrible. Poor little fella,’ she added apologetically.
‘It appears we have discovered a very efficient way of neutering sugar gliders! If I put one stitch around the vessels, we can glue the skin together and that’s the job done.’ I placed a clamp on the exposed vessels. ‘Can you pass me some 4-0 Vicryl suture.’ Moments later the procedure was complete.
‘There we go, the most efficient castration in history!’
‘I can’t believe I did that,’ she said, looking at the pendulous anatomy now dangling from the clipper blades. ‘Do you think Miss Toyah will want to keep the pom-poms?’
‘I can imagine a fashion world that would go crazy for pom-pom earrings, but I don’t think the time is quite yet.’
Turning off the anaesthetic vaporizer, we watched and waited for Shane to come round. Happy that the wound all looked fine we popped him in his knitted pouch and armed ourselves with the dried cranberry and apple pieces ready to distract him on his recovery. Minutes later he started stirring. Seemingly no worse off for his ordeal, he immediately picked up the scent of the food. Julie offered him a cranberry, which he grabbed with both front paws and started tucking into ravenously, then turning with equal enthusiasm to my offering.
‘Isn’t he so cute the way he holds his food, bringing it up to his mouth to devour it?’
It was indeed a very adorable sight.
‘So what now?’
‘If Heather has finished recovering Maisie, she can continue feeding this little fella and we can move on to Sean.’
Adjusting the technique slightly second time around, Sean was successfully and more conventionally castrated using a scalpel blade rather than clippers. He recovered equally well so I was able to discharge Shane and Sean to a delighted Miss Toyah, who also informed us that her week was picking up: Sally was no longer redecorating the downstairs of her house.
‘Miss Toyah was very grateful for our efforts,’ I reported to Julie as she was packing up the surgical kits we had used that day.
‘Oh, I am glad. And how’s Sally the skunk?’
‘Much better.’
‘Sugar gliders and skunks in one week. It doesn’t get much weirder than that, Jon.’
‘I know, not really what you imagine in a rural veterinary practice. Do you think our de-pom-pomming technique will ever make it into the textbooks?’
Sugar gliders: fast facts
Petaurus breviceps: The sugar glider
Distribution: Found throughout the northern and eastern parts of mainland Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and some Indonesian islands.
Names: A male is called a ‘sugar bear’, a female a ‘honey glider’, and the young a ‘joey’. A group of sugar gliders is called a ‘colony’.
Life span: 9–12 years.
Habitat: Rainforest, or dry forests of eucalyptus or acacia trees. They require a dense mid- and upper-canopy cover to enable them to travel through it. Being nocturnal, they are active and feed at night, sheltering in tree hollows during the day.
Diet: Sugar gliders are seasonally adapted omnivores, being insectivorous in the summer and in winter feeding on the sugar gum, sap or nectar that exudes from plants. They are also opportunistic feeders, and will eat small lizards, bird eggs, fungi or native fruits if available.
Gestation: 15–17 days, usually giving birth to 2 joeys.
Weight: 0.2 grams at birth, reaching an adult weight of about 120 grams.
Growth: The joey will migrate to the pouch and latch on to a nipple, where it stays for 60 days. Males can reach sexual maturity as early as 4 months, but females are not sexually mature until about 8 months, neither being fully grown until 2 years.
Body temperature: 35.8–36.9 °C.
Interesting facts: During cold weather, and when food is scarce, sugar gliders are able to enter a state of torpor as an energy-conserving mechanism, allowing their body temperature to drop as low as 10.4 °C without causing any damage. Torpor is different from hibernation in being a short-term daily cycle lasting anything from 2 to 23 hours. They also possess a membrane between their fore and hind limbs, which allows them to launch themselves from a tree and glide for as far as 50 metres. It has been calculated that for every 1.82 metres they travel horizontally, they drop 1 metre.
Conservation: Despite the loss of a lot of their natural habitat in Australia over the last 200 years, sugar gliders have adapted to live in small patches of remnant bush and their numbers have thrived and so they are not considered at risk. The IUCN classes them as being of least concern. However, several of their close relatives such as the Leadbeater’s possum and the mahogany glider are endangered due to deforestation. Since 1990 the world has lost over 129 million hectares of forest – an area the size of South Africa. The World Wildlife Fund is working to lobby governments to improve smarter land use to prevent further deforestation between now and 2030. See: www.wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/deforestation.
20
WILDEBEEST
‘Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.’
Gary Snyder
I was hot, sweaty, hungry and tired, but I couldn’t have been happier. I was back in South Africa again. As I surveyed my surroundings on this 3000-hectare game farm, arid scrubland stretched before me in every direction with just the odd acacia tree to add variety. The only signs of human life were our abandoned vehicles and a group of thirty-odd people busying themselves with khaki tarpaulins and wooden posts. Just twenty-four hours previously this area had been untouched land, but now an enormous v-shaped enclosure stretched out from the bed of a large haulage truck to the brow of a small promontory just visible on the horizon over a kilometre away.
The purpose of this temporary construct was to facilitate the mass capture and relocation of about 400 blue wildebeest. Southern Africa had been in drought for over two years and as such the once-abundant vegetation on which the animals depended for grazing was scarce and waterholes were drying up, critically endangering the wildlife on the reserves. A hundred years ago these animals simply would have migrated to find sustenance, but the continent was different now, the human population having grown exponentially to the detriment of its wildlife. In order to protect that wildlife, animals were no longer free to roam but were instead enclosed within large game reserves, which meant they had nowhere to go when drought struck. As their custodians, the reserve had a duty to intervene so we had been asked to move some of the wildebeest off the farm to other locations where the effects of the drought weren’t as serious – while praying that the rains would eventually come.
This particular area was a ‘big-five’ estate and so home to an abundance of species, many of which also needed their numbers reducing, but today’s task was the relocating of the blue wildebeest. We had found a new place for only about a quarter of the group, which would mean a repeat of today’s complex manoeuvres at a later date. It seemed an inordinate amount of time, effort and manpower for the job involved, but to the capture team and wildlife vets we were working with, this was just another few days at the office; one to load, transport and unload all the kit; another to set up; then probably only a few hours on the actual capture, though that depended on the skill of the helicopter pilot and how far the animals were from this temporary ‘boma’, as these enclosures were called.