Anyone who sees my pictures immediately knows what my heart beats for. It's nature, especially animals.

Even at a young age, I used to drag home everything that creeped and crawled, regardless of whether it was injured or needed help.

My parents were regularly gasping for breath. At the latest when I was supposed to buy jeans in the nearby department store and came home with a cardboard box with holes in it. But what was I supposed to do? Otherwise the mice would have ended up as snake food. After a few discussions with my parents, the mice lived with us for the rest of their lives. My parents were very generous in this respect. They let me nurse baby sparrows, look after butterflies with broken wings, and so on. Well, their pain threshold was reached with the 3 kittens that I got as a gift from the nearby farm because they no longer wanted them. We already had two cats ourselves.

Even as a small child, according to stories, I had a tendency to save everything that could be saved. Back then, it was more about small animals in the form of insects, spiders and worms. At least once a year, my parents tell me how my father regularly had to remove manhole covers to rescue bees, beetles or other creatures from the masses of water. I couldn't be calmed down before that.

The weakness for animals of all kinds has remained and animals in need of help find their way to us again and again. Some have been released back into the wild after their recovery, others have been re-homed or have remained as pets. 

Besides painting, animals are my passion. My vision would be to set up a rescue center for animals one day. As this is hardly feasible in Switzerland, it remains a current dream, but it is a project I am working towards.

So enough about me now. If you're curious to see what animals we've already taken in, here's a short summary from the last few years.

Vole

Severe injuries to her belly and left eye. After initially fearing that she wouldn't survive the first night, I'll let the video speak for itself :-). It was released back into the wild. The video was taken shortly before her release.

We have many pets :-) 

Some have simply found their way to us, others because they were simply no longer wanted.  The unwanted animals were often ill and needed medical care. I'll tell you more about some of these animals later.

Unfortunately, I always have fish and invertebrates that I take over from poor husbandry. The throwaway mentality seems to be particularly strong here. This is certainly also due to the fact that, depending on the species, a fish doesn't really cost very much. An extreme example of this can be seen in a discus that I bought from a poor owner. Normally, the fish would probably have ended up in the toilet (unfortunately a common and bad practice for getting rid of fish). The cost of the medical treatment exceeded the value of the fish many times over. It has made a full recovery.

Another example comes from pigeon breeding. Not that I want to lump all pigeon fanciers together with this report. It was also a pigeon fancier who made the crucial connection at the end so that the pigeon found a new home.

The story: A pigeon flew around our house for a few days. It was obvious that it was completely at the end of its tether. As it was not a wild pigeon, I lured it with food for days until I was able to catch it with a scraper.

Thanks to the pigeon's ringing, the fancier was quickly located. His disinterest on the phone was palpable. The pigeon had not scored the required number of points in the competition. It was then released, in the belief that nature would sort it out. After the phone call, I was the owner of a pigeon. But where should I take the pigeon, I didn't even have an aviary. Rescue came when I called a nearby racing pigeon fancier. Although he couldn't take it in himself, he organized a place in an aviary for me, where it later found a partner.

Our cats were both unwanted. As an unwanted cat in the hotel, one of our cats almost ended up in a sack at the bottom of the lake. So we came home from our vacation in France with a cat instead of a box of wine :-)