Nimbus - Arrived 3rd January 2002
Nimbus was rescued by Orkney Seal Rescue on the 3rd of January 2002 at Kirkwall, after she became separated from her mother during stormy weather. She was found by a member of the public, sheltering from the strong winds in an old concrete dog kennel. Having been without her mother for a number of days she was very underweight for her age, she should have been at least 30 kg.
Nimbus was about 2½ weeks old when she arrived at the sanctuary and weighed 11.4kg, when we gave her a thorough examination we found that, other than being underweight, she had no other injuries or illnesses. We have begun to wean Nimbus onto fish as she is at the stage where naturally in the wild she would begin to separate from her mother and feed on fish herself.
UPDATE 2-3-2002
Nimbus has progressed through the various stages of rehabilitation very rapidly so far. When she arrived she still had all of her white fluffy coat, within one night about ¼ of it was gone, this trend seems to have followed with her feeding progression. After only a few days on Multimilk we began to wean her onto fish, which we force-fed, but within 2 weeks she was so eager for her fish at each feed that we tried her hand-feeding and she took to it straight away. We also found that when we introduced her to water for the first time she loved it and was immediately very graceful (most pups take a while to learn how to control their flippers and work out their buoyancy). She’s now at the stage where we are trying to get her feeding herself, so we are throwing in chopped up bits of herring, at the moment she´s ripping them up and playing with them, but I´m sure she´ll start swallowing them whole soon.
UPDATE 27-5-2002
Nimbus was moved outdoors on the 22nd of February and was immediately in the thick of things. Only 2 hours after arriving in the outdoor pools she followed her playmates into the front-line of feed time, and when she realized there was food around she started wolfing it down. She went from strength to strength, and along the way picked up some tricks; she loved to growl for her fish (although quite often it would end up a gurgle when she forgot to take her mouth out of the water). Nimbus´ weight rapidly increased and when she was released on the 30th of April she weighed 51 kg. At her release she was the most confident of the three pups released that day. She headed straight into the water and started playing in the shallows. At one point it looked like she wanted her playmate, Harry, to follow her out into deeper water, but he was being a bit timid and she was too excited at all the water to explore, she was last seen swimming steadily towards the open sea.
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