Erica Vetra

Guess who's pregnant again!!!!! 🥲🥹 This will be Sarah Connor's third litter!!! 💜 I had the honor of helping her care for the Musketeers last summer and the honor of watching the I-Threes being born in my living room this winter. My heart is overflowing. To me, there is nothing like the trust of a wild animal mother.
All the grandsquirrels still visit the backyard/enclosure daily for treats. Many of you have offered to contribute and that's so sweet 🙏🏼 I've put a link to her Amazon wishlist in the comments. Sarah Connor and her littles appreciate your support so much 🐿️💜☮️💜🐿️

⚠️ Reminder to PLEASE keep an eye on the road when you're driving. It's baby season now. Lots of those little squirrels in the road are mommas with new babies waiting for them. ⚠️🐿️🙏🏼

When my mother was pregnant with me she walked in these woods every day. It was mid June and her due date had passed by 3 weeks. She kept on hiking the gorges and forests every morning hoping to encourage me to finally make an appearance. We joke that I loved being with her in our forests so much, I just didn't want to come out.
I have hiked these same woods for my whole life. All that's changed is that I fall more in love with them every single time. Momma Bear is my best friend. These pictures are from a week that we just spent together side by side in our sacred forests. Then and now, this is home.

Help them out 💜

Appreciate tradesworkers.

Most tree squirrels have two baby seasons per year, summer and winter. Summer mating season has just ended, which means bellies are growing and pregnant mothers are preparing for their new littles. 💜 Please keep an extra keen eye out for squirrels in the street or close to dogs and cats. ⚠️ This time of year there's a good chance they are expecting babies, scrambling to build extra backup nests and forage for extra food. My rehabber friend recently had to perform a C-section on a pregnant mother squirrel who was hit by a car. Squirrel fetuses aren't easy to save. Please don't be the reason for that happening again.🙏🏼

Sarah Connor was orphaned at 5 weeks old. The first slides are from a few days after I took her in. Next slides show her at 2 years old in my living room, guarding her second litter of tiny angels in the nest box below. 🐿️💞

This next baby season is around the corner 😳 I'm watching that little belly of hers...is it time for a Sarah Connor litter number 3️⃣??

Happy 4th! In the United States July 5th is the busiest day of the year for animal shelters. Noise from fireworks makes animals panic and flee, often getting lost and then can't find their way back home, or worse, to their own babies. Fireworks disrupt ecosystems, poison water bodies, separate animal families, cause panic/death in birds, induce PTSD episodes in humans, and more.
Please celebrate with stuff that doesn't cause death and destruction. This holiday is about freedom, peace and respect for everyone, human and non human ☮️🌳

Photo from

Sarah Connor learned how to fly 🙂 How do you like our flip book? 🐿️

Fireworks kill animals and are incredibly stressful for some veterans. Celebrate all you want but please don't cause unnecessary death destruction and stress. 🙏🏼

As someone who works in animal welfare I can't tell you how awful most of the animal laws are in the United States. Most were written purely in the interest of human financial gain. Livestock, domestics, and wildlife are traded, sold, and neglected like pawns. And the ones that aren't, are trophy hunted, tortured, forcefully bred, trapped, chased to exhaustion, killed, and all kinds of terrible s**t that no one wants to look at.

I am tired of hearing things like "it's too painful or depressing to watch" and "Oh, I could never handle seeing those things." Yes it really sucks to see this side of humanity, but sometimes people need to actually LOOK at the hard things. If it makes you uncomfortable to see disturbing photos or videos or hear about animal cruelty, there is a reason, and the reason is that IT IS WRONG. Period.

Animal law enforcement is nowhere near the level it should be in terms of funding, staffing, support, compliance, and penalties. Who's going to make it right? That's our responsibility as kind humans. We have to speak up and make change. If we humans believe we deserve freedom and peace, then guess what - animals do too. (humans are also animals by the way.)

Lots of wonderful folks and organizations are uniting and organizing to fight for better treatment of wildlife in this country. Some are in DC today talking to House and Senate reps, aiming for animal welfare law reform. I cry with hope because it feels good to cry from something other than heartbreak and outrage. But hey, one good use of rage is as the fire of change. Change is coming because WE and YOU are creating it.

A yoga without social justice is not yoga.

Happy Saturday! 🐿🦢☮️ Yoga tomorrow 10:30a CT. ericavetra.com/booking 💜

Hang on tight it's almost Friday! 😁

Lol!

Tomorrow's my birthday! I remember my friend Nikki taking this picture years ago when we lived in Mexico and I decided to steal everyone in the house's clothes and put on a dance performance in her bedroom closet before we left for the beach that morning. Thankful for this crazy lifetime. Here's to many more years of joy 💞

No act of kindness is ever wasted!

We want to make things make sense in our heads, but sometimes that turns into refusal to accept what is, as it is.
When I think about yoga, like outside of Asana practice, ahimsa is one of the big parts of that. It means "to be without harm", i .e. kindness to all beings, also including ourselves. No harm doesn't mean no death or pain. It means being brave enough to be kind instead of violent. There's no requirement to understand or make sense, it's just acceptance and kindness.
What parts of your life, or self, do you want to be kinder to?

I am SO excited for this. I'm doing something I've been wanting to do for awhile: I'm making a coffee table book of my rescue baby squirrels. 💜

When I started creating these calendars four years ago I had no idea how meaningful a practice it would become. It's not really about the calendars. It's an art and a meditation. Each calendar takes about four months to make. It's a long process of diving back into a year's worth of memories, reading through pages of journal entries, sorting through thousands of photos, deciding which parts of each baby's story will translate onto calendar pages, and hoping the corresponding photos are more than hasty blurs of tails and claws, because busy little squirrels are HARD to photograph!! It's four months of honoring the life saving triumphs, crying through the losses, and really just reliving all the pure LOVE that each of these little guys brings.

The end product is a chronological journey of the life of a rescue bean. Each page of a calendar builds on the month before it. And each month of the year corresponds to that same month of the years prior. So when I create a calendar, I also spend those months with the memories of rescues past. It is so special to revisit their energy and precious little faces.

Making the coffee table book is challenging, and it's SO exciting and freeing because there's so much more space, and I can share so many other sweet babies with you all. I want to take every chance possible to honor my rescues and spread their wisdom. I know we all know how powerful the teachings of animals are, and now equally powerful their love is.

So today being the last day of this month I really wanted to share the May photos from the last four years. May is a special month...since 2020 May has held some of the most poignant moments in my rehabbing. I keep each calendar on my wall and add to the line each year. 💜

The love, panic, focus, devotion, acceptance, heartache, and joy of working with animals is so freaking special. For me it's squirrels, wolves, foxes, cows....for others it's snakes, lizards, whales, sharks....the love is the love. And the love is what heals.

Stay tuned, and happy June ✨🐿️☮️

Ooo y'all it's coming together! ✨ Being in sync feels so good. Everything's flowing. All there is to do is breathe straight into the momentum. So grateful for Alignment 🙏🏼

Join us on Sundays at 10:30a CT to breathe and align. ericavetra.com/booking ✨

Oh my heart..I look up from washing dishes and see I have an audience of momma queen and her I-Three 🥹 So blessed with the love and trust from my precious momma squirrel and her tiny miracles. This little girl is Pippi Longstocking 💜🐿️💞 She got shy at the end and wriggled back inside 🥲

🙏🏼

In a new phase. I'm excited. Feeling lighter. I've been writing more lately and it feels good to open up. Happy Gemini season ✨

Yoga class this Sunday morning on Zoom with 72hr replay access. We'd love to see you 💜 ericavetra.com/booking

It's my spirit animal!

My rescues planted a whole sunflower garden! 🌻 The flowers bloomed last week and I'm glad I took pictures because today I walked outside to find them decapping all the flowers and eating them for lunch 😬

Take good care of your trees 🌳

🌳 PSA: Say No to Tree Topping! 🌳

Tree topping, or the removal of large branches back to stubs or bare trunks, might seem like a quick fix for overgrown trees. After all, removing so much at once means you can save on pruning, right? Wrong! Tree topping does more harm than good. Here's why you should avoid it:

🌿 Tree Stress & Starvation: Topping removes crucial leaves that trees need for photosynthesis, leading to stress and weakened health.

🦠 Increased Risk of Disease & Pests: Large wounds from topping are slow to heal, inviting diseases and pests into the tree.

🌱 Weak & Rapid Regrowth: Trees respond to topping with weak, fast-growing shoots that require frequent pruning.

🚨 Risk & Liability: Topped trees become structurally unsound and pose safety risks.

Instead of topping, opt for crown reduction pruning to safely shorten branches while maintaining tree health. And remember, planting the right tree in the right place is key to avoiding future issues! 🌳

Angry post. This is my friend's young wolf who I get to hang out with periodically. He's such a sweet, shy, goofy young man.

A couple months ago in Wyoming, a disgusting coward piece of s**t human named Cody Roberts intentionally ran over a young female wolf with his snowmobile. Then he duct taped her mouth shut and took her to the in Daniel Wyoming where he proceeded to torture her, let his dogs attack her, parade her around the bar, kiss her when she was near death, and finally drag her out back behind the bar to shoot her dead. This whole spectacle was not only allowed but encouraged and applauded by the bar owner and her patrons. The wolf pup was 9 months old.

Inexplicably, it is NOT ILLEGAL to run animals down with snowmobiles. Cody Roberts received a $250 fine from for torturing and killing an animal. What he deserves to get is exactly what the f**k he did to her. Who knows what other disgusting s**t he’s done that didn’t make it to the news.

Animals don't exist for human entertainment. There is no such thing as sport hunting, sport abuse, sport r**e, or sport torture. I am not sure exactly what makes people think it’s ok to play with animal lives this way, but I do know that animal abuse behavior has been linked many times to things like murder, r**e, and pe******ia. However we want to be treated is exactly how we need to treat other living beings. Period. Leave them the f**k alone and let them live in peace.

If this resonates with you, if you respect LIFE, please share and spread. We can make change. Your voice is NOT too small. No life is too small. Spread the word. Hold this piece of s**t Cody Roberts accountable. Hold bulls**t and bulls**t accountable. If we don't speak out, people like this will keep doing and encouraging cruel hellish things. We CAN stop them. Speak up for the lives that have been lost. Let's not let them die in vain.

Learn more about wolf protection efforts at . There’s a motorcycle ride later this month going from Texas to Wyoming. Join or support .black

May 10th, 1981 was the last day of Bob Marley’s life. The next day he passed, at 36 years old. I end up waxing on this every year. It's a special day. Imagine if he knew it was his last day to live. What would you do if you knew? Bob has been my sound track since I was a little kid. I listened to all his albums until the tape, yes the physical tape, wore out. He's a master of simple truth and reminder of our humanity, all the parts. He makes me want to live with purpose. I wish I knew him personally. There's something about his energy and consciousness that's more than this world. Happy last day to you Bob, wherever you are. We love you so much 💚💛❤️

Finally remembered to hit the reset button! ☮️
Have a great week guys! 🫧

K guys I need your
mushroom coffee recs please!! ☕ 🍄

🕉️ Weekend yoga update! So y'all know I teach yoga classes on Zoom. When you book a class with me, you get access to the class replay. Well NOW that access lasts for 72 hours! Yay! 🥂 So if you can't make the class time (I only teach a few weekly), you'll still get three days to practice the recording as much as you want.

I am very happy about this! I'd love for you to join us on Zoom, or on replay. ericavetra.com/booking.

🎉 Newcomers - get 3 classes for $26. You can also get packs of 5 or 10 classes. They make good gifts too!

See y'all tomorrow (Sunday) at 10:30a CT for Vinyasa! ericavetra.com/booking 🕉️