glumshoe:

Two nights ago, I attended a party hosted by our bird rehabber friends. I met an old German woman there with waist-length gray hair, crooked teeth, and wild magic. Fitting, in a wildlife rehabber. 

She couldn’t speak to animals, of course – she wasn’t Doctor Doolittle. But she was able to raise newborn rabbits with a 70% survival rate, which is phenomenal. She said it was higher for rabbits that were simply orphaned rather than injured, but most rehabbers don’t even accept bunnies because they have such low survival rates and are so demanding on a rehabber’s time and resources. 

Her secret, she said, was just that animals simply do not find her intimidating. She can’t scare off a squirrel by chasing after it because it does not perceive her as a threat. Wild rabbits are difficult to raise from infancy in large part because they’re so easily terrified, and their little hearts burst from panic when being tended to by a human. Unless that human doesn’t register as a threat, supposedly.

She also claims to have lifted whole families of skunks out of window wells by hand, without being sprayed or nipped at at all. Personally, I think I’d be less nervous wrestling a saltwater crocodile.