Volunteers in Backyard Clinics Give Injured Animals a New Chance : Rehabilitating Wildlife: Reward Comes When the Patient Flies Away

Mary Lou Riccardo doesn’t mind waking up every two hours to feed a baby raccoon. She is even willing to dice mice for a hungry owlet. But there are some things even the most devoted wildlife nurse will not do.

“One of the favorite foods of the great horned owl is road-killed skunk,” Riccardo says. “That’s where I draw the line. I will not pick up a dead skunk.”

Riccardo is a wildlife rehabilitator, an unpaid volunteer licensed by state and federal agencies to care for injured or orphaned animals until they are well enough to be returned to the wild.

It’s a seven-day-a-week, often 16-hour-a-day job, with no pay other than occasional donations. But for Riccardo and a growing number of others who share her vocation, it’s a consuming passion.

“Sometimes I get exhausted, I think I can’t do any more,” Riccardo said in an interview at her home in suburban Albany. “But then a little animal comes along that’s helpless, and I know that if I’m not here for him, no one will help. And I get all fired up again.”

Tankful of Beetles

Her convalescent center is in the backyard of her brick house. Tall oaks and cedars conceal a walk-in raccoon cage complete with tree house, tire swing and plastic pool; an aviary where injured birds of prey can exercise their wings; and wire pens of various sizes to shelter squirrels, opossums, skunks and whatever else arrives in the arms of a concerned citizen.

Her laundry room doubles as a clinic, crowded with cages for the very young or very ill. A bag of sterile saline dangles over the washer and dryer, which serve as a treatment table. A bran-filled aquarium tank seethes with black beetles and their larvae, the mealworms consumed by the tens of thousands by Riccardo’s recuperating songbirds.

Riccardo estimates that she gets about 1,000 calls a year. Sometimes people just need advice: Skunks are digging up a lawn, raccoons are nesting in a chimney, a cardinal is pecking at a window.

She takes in more than 200 animals a year. All are recorded on log sheets to be turned in to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which licenses rehabilitators. She refuses nothing.

“If a person cares enough to bring it to me, no matter what it is, I’ll do my best to save it,” she says. “I’ve done English sparrows, pigeons, nuthatches, woodchucks, fawns, great blue herons, starlings, shrews, even field mice. There’s nothing I won’t do.”

There are about 450 licensed rehabilitators in New York state, but many of them limit the number or type of animals they will take, Riccardo says. “And most veterinarians won’t treat wild animals, or don’t know how to.”

Riccardo is a member of the International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, a California-based organization that trains and certifies rehabilitators.

Membership in the council has nearly doubled in the last few years to about 1,000 individuals and organizations, according to Jan White, the council’s executive director and editor of its quarterly Wildlife Journal.

Of an estimated 2,000 licensed rehabilitators nationwide, the greatest concentrations are in New York and California, White says. “That’s where the interaction with wildlife is.”

“Ninety percent of the animals brought to us are here because of man’s interference,” says Riccardo, who also works part-time leading field trips at a state-run nature center south of Albany. “It’s tree-cutting, trapping, poisons, pesticides, cats, dogs, cars. We owe these animals a second chance.”

As the ranks of wildlife rehabilitators have grown, so have their expertise.

“Wildlife rehabilitation is becoming more sophisticated,” White says. “It’s a lot more science-oriented than it was 15 years ago, less anecdotal. We have conferences, journals, symposia. We’ve developed networks to share information.”

“Twenty years ago, an animal that came in had about a 30% chance of being returned to the wild,” says White, who is also a veterinary student. “Now a good rehab center can expect to return about 50%.”

Forms Coalition

Riccardo recently formed a coalition of rehabilitators in the Albany area called Wildlife Rehabilitation and Educational Network Inc., or WREN for short. The organization will serve as a means of sharing resources and expertise.

Seminars held by the International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council include hands-on training in tube-feeding, calculation of medicine dosages, injections, administration of subcutaneous fluids and basic care and feeding.

The wrong diet can be deadly. Meat can kill a hawk that is too weak to digest it. A dehydrated fawn may die of diarrhea if given cow’s milk.

Riccardo purees mice in a blender to feed baby hawks. Later she teaches them to hunt, using live laboratory mice. Raccoons learn to catch frogs and crayfish in their plastic pool. Riccardo also brings home wild grapes, road-killed animals and other delicacies. “You have to introduce them to things they’ll find in the wild.”

Riccardo has a few favorite stories of amazing recoveries.

There was the baby raccoon found lying in the road, emaciated and infested with maggots. “He apparently had crawled onto the warm pavement to die,” Riccardo says. “He was so dehydrated his skin was just glued to his skeleton.” But she managed to get a needle under the skin to administer subcutaneous fluids, and the animal survived.

Starving Hawk

Last May, someone brought Riccardo a baby red-tailed hawk that apparently had fallen out of a nest; it was starving. With tube-feeding and tender care, the scrawny bird grew strong. But its flight feathers had been weakened for lack of minerals.

With the help of a falconer, Riccardo replaced the damaged plumage with feathers from a dead hawk of the same species, a procedure called “imping.”

“That bird is now flying with another bird’s feathers,” she says. “He’s my pride and joy.”

Wounded Pigeon

But her favorite story is that of a common pigeon, brought to her by an elderly man two summers ago. It had been shot by a pellet gun, its wing tip nearly severed. The man had taped the wing and rushed to Riccardo’s house.

“I had to amputate half the wing,” she said. “I told the man the bird would never fly with half its flight feathers gone.” But when she saw the man’s eyes, misty and pleading, she said she would do her best.

“All winter, that bird exercised his half a wing,” she said. In the spring, she took the bird back to the man’s house and let it go.

“That bird flew!” she says. “I couldn’t believe my eyes.”