Brent Lodge Wildlife Hospital is based in Sidlesham, West Sussex. We take in sick injured and orphaned wildlife and treat them so that they can be rehabilitated back into the wild.
‘The TLC 40 and TLC 50 intensive care units that we have are vital to our work. We often get young orphaned animals and birds who need to be kept warm at all times in order to survive. In fact during the summer months we often have tiny baby birds that have fallen from nests. They are only a day or so old so need to be kept super warm like their mum would do in the wild. We take in everything from baby robins to baby owls to baby hedgehogs and baby badgers. We have even housed little week old fawns in our larger TLC 50 machines.
In the autumn we take in between 200 and 300 ‘autumn juvenile’ hedgehogs that need us to care for them throughout the cold winter months. Without our help these little hoggies simply wouldn’t survive as they are too small to hibernate. We recently had over 70 hedgehogs in care and every single one of our 14 TLC machines had tiny hoglets in them that were born too late in the year. In fact, one was just 77g and they need to be at least 600g to survive the winter. We have even had to ‘double up’ with 2 or 3 hoggies in some of our larger machines so we are excited that we will soon be ordering some more to cope with demand.
Brent Lodge Wildlife Hospital relies on the TLC incubators to provide intensive care for small animals.
Another reason the TLC machines are so critical to our work is for the extremely sickly and weak animals we receive. Being a working hospital we take in some incredibly poorly animals who come into us flat and dehydrated. So weak in fact, they can barely lift their own heads or control their own body temperature. They really do need to be comfortable and in a warm ‘cage’ in order to recover. The TLC units are perfect for that!
The most important thing for us is that the TLC units are easy to clean. The animals we take in could be carrying all sorts of illness or disease so it is crucial that we are able to thoroughly clean the units to prevent re-infection to that animal and even the further infection of other animals that may be housed in that unit at a later date. We are able take the units apart and completely disinfect them in between patients which is great! We much prefer these models to previous models. They are perfect for the work we do!’
Emma Pink, Brent Lodge Wildlife Hospital Manager
Registered Charity 276179
www.brentlodge.org
