I was recently chastised by the rescuer of an aracari toucan that followed me into the house and made it clear that he wanted a drink of water from the faucet. I gave him a drink and took photos of such an unusual event, sharing them online. I wasn’t sure where the bird had come from and, though he had a little band on his front ankle it didn’t say anything that I could see. Even if it had, the bird, in my mind, had every right to live freely and go where he wanted to when he wanted to. I was concerned about his obvious comfort with entering a house and asking a stranger for water and wanting to hang around inside the house for a couple of hours instead of outside with others of his kind.

An aracari in Caribbean Costa Rica

I was contacted by this person from the rescue center who happened to see a photo of the bird that I’d shared, and told I had no right to post the photo without permission. Whose permission? The bird’s? He posed for my photos, as I’m sure he does all the time. Or was I simply to assume that a wild animal that behaves that way must be a refugee from the center, which he returned to later of his own free will, having lived with the people there for most of his life? Does that mean the creature is theirs, that he *belongs to* them and that I must ask their permission?

This baby porcupine crawled up my body and settled on my head until we were sitting down at home.

I have very mixed feelings about saving abandoned and/or injured wild animals. Last year I was in a situation when someone took me to a baby porcupine that was found shrieking in the bushes near my home. I bent down to see what the creature was and he looked at me and climbed up my body to perch on my head, then calmed down. I felt I couldn’t remove him and leave him back there in the bush after that, so I took him home, fed him and cared for him for about a week, when I reluctantly took him to the rescue center hoping they could take better care of him because I didn’t have the right things to feed a baby porcupine. Alas, he died a day or two later, from a hole in his intestine, I was told, most likely the reason he’d been abandoned by his mother, as is often done in nature.

People rescue wild animals all the time, often after an animal has been injured by a dog, a car or some other human-created thing, like a power line. It seems like the right thing to do, as that animal would likely be living a normal, healthy life if not for humans, our pets and belongings. However, what about in a situation like the porcupine? Would it have been better to just leave him crying in the bushes until he starved to death? He seemed to choose to go with me, so I took him. I don’t know if I could leave another animal I encountered if it was disabled and couldn’t choose for itself. It’s likely that I would take that animal home too. Ah, the complexities of life!