April is nesting time for many species. Most animals are extremely wary of others getting near their eggs or young, but I met a Canadian snow goose the other week at Meadowlark Botanical Gardens that let me walk right up to her nest.

After carefully arranging and checking the eggs, she settled down and preened, although I decided she was doing goose yoga.

Who else has been tending to their eggs?! The bald eagles, of course! This picture is from a couple of weeks ago; I’ve heard the eaglets have now hatched. I can’t wait until they start flying!

And yes, although they don’t come in eggs, it’s baby raccoon time as well! Taken two weeks ago, this is one of Emmy’s babies. It was 5 days old in this photo. Emmy is a wild raccoon that was rehabbed by Dogue Hollow their first year, so she’s ten years old. She’s also a great mother and has raised orphan babies for us in the past. In fact, when a neighboring mother raccoon left her den for too long last week, Emmy couldn’t stand the babies’ crying and trotted over and “rescued” one before the other mother returned!

Speaking of Dogue Hollow, a very kind reader alerted me a while ago of Amazon’s new “AmazonSmile” program. All you do is pick your favorite charity, then start shopping at smile.amazon.com instead of www.amazon.com and Amazon will donate 0.5% of the purchase price of many of their items (nothing I have bought in the last few months has not been included) to that charity. I’m not going to spam you and beg for money (although we desperately need some!), but this is really a free and effortless way to raise a little money for your favorite charity, and if your favorite charity happens to be Dogue Hollow, so much the better! Make a raccoon happy today!

(If you don’t want to set anything up now, I have created a Helping wildlife page under my “About the author” page that has information about donating to both Dogue Hollow and the Raptor Conservancy of Virginia.)