Return to story

WILDLIFE HAVEN SOARS The Wildlife Center of Virginia is a unique rescue, education facility

January 21, 2006 1:39 am

AYNESBORO--The doctor has scrubbed up for the procedure, carefully rubbing an iodine disinfectant up to her elbows.

Blue surgical gown, hair net and face mask on, Camille Harris begins prepping the patient as operating room assistant Leigh-Ann Horne monitors vital signs and an intravenous drip.

It could be a scene from any general hospital, but this venue has nothing to do with people.

The doctors here are veterinarians and the patients, wild animals--in this case, a barred owl with a broken wing.

Harris, 28, covers the brown-and-white bird with sterile cloth to isolate the right wing, cutting a hole in the cloth to expose the area of the break. X-rays hang on a light screen nearby.

Earlier, the owl was anesthetized and feathers removed on the spot over the break, exposing pale, bumpy tan skin.

Harris and Horne work slowly, deliberately.

"I'm dissecting the muscle and tissue and placing a pin inside the bone to help stabilize it so it can heal," said Harris.

Welcome to the Wildlife Center of Virginia, a one-of-a-kind private, nonprofit haven and hospital for all things wild, whose mission is treatment, conservation and education.

The patient on the table two weeks ago got here in a fairly typical way: The male bird was struck by a pickup truck, which inflicted an eye injury and the wing-break. The creature was probably hunting for mice along the highway.

The driver captured him, put him in a box, and took him to Natural Bridge Animal Hospital, which then sent the owl to the Wildlife Center.

Three hours later, Harris had finished the operation.

"He looks pretty darn good. The surgery went well, and he has a good prognosis," she said.

January is typically a slow month at the center, which sits under a canopy of hardwoods along a hillside in this Shenandoah Valley city off Interstate 64.

But "slow" is a relative term, staffers hasten to say. On a slow day, the center might get three or four animals; some days it can top out at 100 or more.

At any time someone can pull up to the glass doors out front with a cardboard box or bag containing most any kind of wild creature.

The list is exhaustive, from rodents to raptors, the occasional deer, bobcat, frog, bear, beaver, chipmunk and yellow-bellied sapsucker.

The lucky ones are patched up and sent back to where they were found, to be released. Some that survive but can't be let go become part of the center's traveling education menagerie, occupying roomy cages behind the main building.

Some, sadly, are euthanized.

Even some exotic animals not native to the state make their way here.

Since Jan. 1, dozens of animals have been brought to the center, including a black vulture, Cooper's hawk, red-tailed hawk, rabbit, mallard duck, two bald eagles, several owls, a bluebird.

Along one wall next to the operating room, about a dozen box turtles have temporary lodging in large, blue plastic bowls partially filled with water. Occasionally, one escapes, plodding along the floor at turtle warp speed.

Patricia Bright, director of veterinary services, who leads the center's staff of three vets, explained that the reptiles were found in the late fall, too late to be treated and released. They'll be kept here until temperatures moderate in the early spring.

A fair number of raptors come in during the winter months.

"Rodents are along the roads, looking for salt," she said, and the birds are drawn to them. If they happen to be weak or impaired in any way, their normally keen eyesight and reaction time are affected and they get hit.

Last year, 2,369 injured, ailing or orphaned animals were admitted to the center, most of them from counties in the valley. The second week of May 2005 was the busiest week of the year, with a total of 170 animals admitted. That's an average of one every 20 minutes during office hours, for seven days. During the year, 27 came from the Fredericksburg area.

Since its founding in 1982, the Wildlife Center has cared for about 46,000 wild animals, representing 200 species of native birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians.

Bright, 43, who grew up in Pennsylvania, got hooked on animals when her husband, Richard, bought her a pet bird for Christmas.

She laughs, "We joke now that it is the world's most expensive cockatiel." She went on to veterinary school, worked with endangered species, received a master's degree in wildlife conservation and then studied epidemiology at the University of Maryland.

She worked as a vet here and last May landed her "dream job" heading up the veterinary program.

"What we see in the clinic varies from season to season," she said.

In the spring, a lot of baby animals, some suffering disease or trauma, come through the door.

"Many of those injuries come from cat attacks," she said. "In the summer, it's box turtles" hit by cars.

In December, two bald eagles rehabilitated at the center were released at Land's End Wildlife Management Area in King George County.

One, an adult female, was picked up by a game warden in Essex County, thin and unable to fly and admitted to the Wildlife Center last September.

Vets did a complete diagnostic work-up on the bird, X-rays, blood work and ultrasound. In November the eagle was transferred to the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech to test for nerve damage. The bird was treated with antibiotics, then sent back to the Wildlife Center to exercise its wings in a large, enclosed flight pen.

The second, younger bird was picked up in a weakened condition in King and Queen County and sent to a veterinary clinic in Yorktown. It was moved to the Wildlife Center in early December and released Dec. 20.

Last year, 20 bald eagles were treated; nine were released.

"We spend a lot of time talking to the public," Bright said. "They'll call when the see something down or run over, a nest of baby bunnies."

The center, about 85 miles from Fredericksburg, is staffed seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a vet on call after hours. Anyone can call for information in an emergency or bring in an injured wild animal for treatment, which is done free of charge.

Bob Duncan, director of the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries' Wildlife Division, says the Waynesboro complex is Virginia's premier wildlife hospital, rehabilitation and education center.

"The folks there are really top notch. It's amazing what they've been able to do and their expertise in performing critical service to wildlife and the people of this state," Duncan said.

Department game wardens and scientists, he said, work closely with the Wildlife Center. For example, when the state needed a holding area for black bears, it built one.

Duncan said that as sprawl shrinks wildlife habitat in more areas of Virginia, "People want a place to turn to" for information, "and they've done a tremendous job."

When the center isn't patching up or caring for injured wildlife, it's teaching people about them.

Kelly Rourke, the education coordinator, says practically every elementary school in Virginia has hosted one of its programs. Libraries and Scout troops frequently ask for visits.

A couple of times a week, she packs up some animals for the trip. Tens of thousands of schoolchildren often get their first up-close look at wildlife during one of the visits, which include not only information about the animals, but primers on conservation practices.

"We'll usually take three animals to a school," she said, generally a bird of prey, opossum and a reptile.

All of the "education animals" living in cages behind the main building, came in injured or traumatized in some way, but could not be released back into the wild.

There are 15 birds, three opossums, four snakes and Emma, the tortoise.

Unlike the 50 or so animals in the hospital--all referred to by number--these have names and are permanent residents.

How and when they wound up at the center is included on a little sign attached to their enclosures.

Westley the crow jumps about his cage and caws whenever visitors pass by. Across from him is Junior, a golden eagle acquired in 1985.

In another cage is Kettler, a broad wing hawk, also a longtime resident.

"She was pushed out of the nest, probably, and had a broken wing," Rourke said.

Nearby are Iris and Buzz, great horned owls found in Henrico County and Weyers Cave.

In the center's "kitchen," there are feeding instructions for patients and education animals.

If there were such a thing as a fancy outdoor restaurant for the birds, this would be it.

For example, under entrees it lists "meal worms in small dish; canned dog food; birdseed sprinkled with cracked corn "

For weasels: one mouse. A mink (a rare relative of a beaver) gets one small rat, several small fish.

Staffers make frequent "rat runs" to a nearby lab supplier to stock up on live snacks for their charges.

Next to the kitchen is a warm, dark room with the center's more unusual residents: two 3-foot caimans. The alligator relatives are native to Central and South America and are illegal to possess in Virginia.

For now, the reptiles are spending their days in a water-filled plastic tub under heat lamps. The toothy denizens dine on trout donated by a nearby fish hatchery.

"They're here until a court case is resolved," Rourke said. They belong to a man who was ratted out, in a manner of speaking, by his wife in a custody dispute.

A graduate of York College in Pennsylvania, Rourke, 33, worked at the center's environmental education program before taking her current job three years ago.

Overseeing the center is its president and co-founder, Ed Clark, 54, an ebullient manager and cheerleader with almost raptorlike piercing blue eyes.

In the fall of 1982, "We started off with the intention of being a local wildlife rehabilitation center," Clark said. "Four of us--all volunteers--started it."

"We began with the idea of providing a local service for injured animals," he recalled. Clark and his then-wife lived on a horse farm outside Waynesboro.

"We converted the barn and horse stalls into bird cages, and the hayloft with smaller cages, and the feed room into a clinic.

"It was Spartan at the time, but the only building dedicated to wildlife care in Virginia."

In 23 years, "We grew from a dinky, four-volunteer Band-Aid station for bunnies to the largest wildlife hospital in the world," said Clark, who worked for conservation agencies before starting the center. He was the first executive director of what is now the Virginia Conservation Network.

"Back then, with all the professional conservationists in Virginia, you couldn't get a good hand of poker going."

By 1985 the center outgrew the barn and moved into a double wide trailer in Weyers Cave, between Staunton and Harrisonburg.

"That's where we crossed the threshold and became a truly professional conservation organization," Clark said. Over the next decade, it cared for 17,000 animals and provided education and conservation services to "literally hundreds of thousands of people."

The center moved to its current location in 1995. One building houses the hospital and offices, with 60,000 square feet of animal enclosures and cages out back.

It's not open to the public, but hosts open houses several times a year.

DuPont Corp. donated most of the land; a local resident donated the rest. And the center has the use of over 300 acres of adjacent land for its activities through an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service.

There are 17 full-time staffers, including three veterinarians, three licensed wildlife rehabilitators and an outreach coordinator who handles training and community liaison.

It has a nine-member board of directors.

The nonprofit center operates on private funding. Two-thirds of the money comes from individual contributions, the rest from fees for its programs and from charitable foundations. The operating budget was approximately $750,000 in 2005. Donations of time and materials, such as supplies and feed, account for another $250,000.

Clark says the Wildlife Center has been steadily building on its core clinic, rehabilitation, education and community outreach programs, both here and abroad.

It has worked with state and federal agencies in the U.S., and with Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico on emergency wildlife care techniques and black market trafficking.

Clark has appeared on cable TV's popular "Animal Planet" and frequents the General Assembly in Richmond to lobby on behalf of wildlife.

Duncan, of the state game department, said Clark and the center have done groundbreaking work.

Clark worked with the wildlife division to change state and federal law banning the use of certain granular pesticides, and helped to document ear infections in eastern box turtles, and conjunctivitis among finches at bird feeders, Duncan said.

"He's one of the best spokesmen that wildlife in Virginia has," Duncan said.

Clark said new issues are always being addressed.

"We're moving in the direction of getting increasingly involved in epidemiology of wildlife disease," he said, noting that Bright is a board-certified epidemiologist and avian medicine expert.

For several years the center has operated an accredited post-doctoral residency program for veterinarians. Harris is finishing up a one-year internship.

The center has applied for a grant to establish a nationwide wildlife disease network that would link wildlife hospitals as sentinels in case of an outbreak that might affect humans.

Relatively recent examples such as bird flu and West Nile virus point to the necessity for that. "This could be a significant deterrent to bioterrorism," Clark said.

"I can only imagine where we'll be 10 years from now. Every day when I come to work there's an opportunity for us to make a difference in the world, a real, honest-to-God difference" for creatures who can't speak for themselves.

"Our organization is about teaching. I don't care if you're an elementary school kid or a senator, if we can teach you about wildlife and to care about it."

RUSTY DENNEN is a staff writer with The Free Lance-Star. Contact him at 540/374-5431, or rdennen@freelance star.com. SUZANNE CARR ROSSI is a staff photographer with The Free Lance-Star.