Rescuing All Creatures, Soaked and Starving : Midwest: Wildlife CPR made a splash during last year’s floods, saving cats, a possum, even a salamander. Now this animal rescue squad has found a permanent home and is busier than ever.

They made headlines last year saving the forgotten victims of the great Midwest flood--the victims with whiskers, wings and webbed feet.

Now Mary Rotz and Jane Seitz are moving Wildlife CPR from their living rooms to 10 rustic acres in central Illinois. Selling two of their rescue boats and using four others as collateral, they bought the property for $16,000.

Since 1991, the two have cared for more than 1,000 animals, many of them endangered or threatened. The phones would ring with news of an owl caught in barbed wire, baby birds left homeless by a storm, a muskrat with an eye infection, a badger with a concussion.

“Since I’ve been doing this, my religion has been deeper, broader,” said Seitz, who quit a full-time job so she could nurse animals and then return them to the wild. “Mary and I just never learned to say no.”

But until last summer, the two had limited their mission to central Illinois and paid most expenses from their own pockets. Then a flood of historic proportions hit the Midwest; their tiny organization was never the same.

Rotz, Seitz and Jack Nuzzo, a former Boy Scout ecology director, began making 300-mile round trips to the Mississippi River. They dived into murky water to rescue cats, grabbed a starving possum whose babies had drowned in its pouch and even raised a salamander to safety.

At first they hopped aboard Coast Guard boats to hunt for trapped animals, then bought two vessels of their own. The four others were donated.

As their work gained attention, more donations began to trickle in, including $5,000 from the International Fund for Animal Welfare. They still have to take money from their pockets to keep Wildlife CPR going, however.

“They are very dedicated people who do a fantastic job,” said veterinarian Thomas Burke, director of the wildlife clinic at the University of Illinois.

They do it for the animals, the kind of everyday wildlife that Nuzzo noted are sometimes overlooked.

“Kids in school hear about elephants, pandas and giraffes,” he said. “But they don’t know much about the American bittern, a state endangered bird.”

“God didn’t make a useless animal,” said Rotz, inspecting the wing of an injured pigeon. “There’s a reason for them all.”