Pauline’s page Dear Friends,


I hope you didn’t mind that we used the front of our Christmas Newsletter to wish you all a happy festive season. We now have so many people who send us such lovely cards that the postage to return those wishes costs the charity so much money. We all hope that your Christmas was special and here’s to a healthy and peaceful 2011.


Well this winter isn’t one that we shall forget very quickly! Somerset is not a County where we expect to experience deep snow but it came and stayed and stayed. The number of animals that started to pour in was something we had never seen in previous winters and at one time we did not have a single casualty pen empty.


Owls, swans, herons and egrets were the most common of the casualties. Many so exhausted and hungry when they arrived that, a lot of them didn’t last through the night. See the article inside about our huge swan rescue on Boxing Day.


Staff and volunteers turned into work and we would have been lost without the ones that lived nearby and came in even though they weren’t due to come in. As you can imagine it was hard to get fresh water to everything and keep them warm but many of you donated food, which has been really great and a huge thank you for responding to our Christmas Appeal. Our family of animals enjoyed the


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leisure of staying in a warm flat rather than going outside. Gem, one of our cats was oblivious to what was going on because he was so nice and warm next to the radiator in the cubby hole. Mollie, our Labrador, used Albert for a pillow near the fire in the kitchen.


They were pleased to regain the cubby hole which I thought was going to be busy through the Christmas weekend. We had two otter cubs brought in to us at the beginning of December. The people who brought them in had waited sometime before moving them, although the cubs had been in the cold water and were under a bridge calling. It is so difficult to know when to pick things up and how long you should leave them. Both cubs were hungry and the mother, if still alive, had obviously been finding it difficult to find food for them. One was quite a bit smaller than the other and that one sadly died during the first night.


Frosty, as the otter cub was named, soon started to eat fish but still took a bottle for a couple of weeks. Then just before Christmas, he stopped wanting milk and really needed to go outside in a pen but the weather was so cold that it seemed unfair to move him from the warm kitchen to a cold pen - even with a heater on! At the same time the Wildlife Unit at West Hatch had a cub nearly the same age and facilities that are centrally heated.


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