Human Helpers Give Mother Nature a Hand

Songbirds slam into windows. Deer misjudge fences they’re trying to hurtle. Pelicans gulp down wads of fishing line.

Nature has a hard enough time managing on its own. Mix in highways, off-road vehicles, garden rakes, fishing nets--even plain old dogs and cats--and wildlife is bound to run into trouble.

So in Southern California, where neighborhoods grow like stucco tendrils up wild canyons and mountain slopes, humans are increasingly maiming animals or coming across ones that are already injured.

Where do these feral casualties go?

In the best of circumstances, they land in the hands of a patchy network of about 30 licensed wildlife rehabilitators, who try to restore the animals to health and release them.

“There are a tremendous amount of people who find an injured animal and try to raise them at home,” said Aaron Frank, executive director of the California Wildlife Center in the Santa Monica Mountains. “The animals just do terribly, so [the people] call us.”

His center, which is staffed 24 hours a day, consists of an old cabin and several wire-and-plywood cages methodically placed--to suit the needs of the animal being held--on a scrubby hillside under pines and giant live oaks.

The center’s convalescing creatures are not exotic species. Recent patients included three caged black crows, a sea gull shrieking indignantly in the shade and a couple of fox squirrels napping in a little wooden box down the hill.

Meanwhile, two staff members drive a pickup truck around the area, responding to calls for the de-limbed and disemboweled, the sickened, scalped, battered and broken.

But they and other rehabilitation experts say there are gaping holes in this safety net.

According to them, many of the animal control agencies that first respond to calls for injured animals don’t know that the rehabilitators exist. And even if they do know, oftentimes there is no way to transport the creatures to the wildlife shelters in time to save their lives.

Too often, the injured wildlife ends up staying in regular animal control shelters unequipped to deal with the creatures’ specific, delicate physiological needs. They may be euthanized because they are too far gone when picked up, or they might perish from malnutrition or stress because animal control lacks the proper facilities or expertise.

“If you put a little bunny next to a kennel of barking dogs, it’s not going to last more than a few hours,” said Rebecca Dmytryk, who founded the California Wildlife Center, but no longer works there. “It’s going to die of stress.”

Dmytryk is trying to create a “wildlife paramedic” service to prevent such placements from happening. According to her proposal, volunteers would be on call 24 hours a day to fan out across the Southland and pick up animals. They would take the animals to the rehabilitation center best suited for them. Certain shelters specialize in seals or sea lions, others in raptors, pelicans, possums and deer.

“You’re not going to take a bat to someone who works on dogs,” said Lt. Joe Baima, regional head of wildlife protection for the state Department of Fish and Game.

“The biggest problem is that the shelters are understaffed and underfunded,” Baima said.

But some say the system is working. At the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control, officials say they are quick to get animals to the rehabilitators, whom they say they know well.

“Our people have been in this business long enough to know who to call,” said Bob Ballenger, spokesman for the department. “It’s not like we just say: ‘Oh gee, we’re stuck with this Komodo dragon and don’t know what to do with it. Well, let’s feed it chickens.”’

Madeline Bernstein, president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Los Angeles, said there is room for improvement, but that the Department of Fish and Game should take the lead if there is going to be a more centralized network of wildlife rehabilitators.

“Most legitimate animal shelters and SPCAs have a list of permitted rehabilitators,” Bernstein said. “We know who handles birds of prey. We know who handles possums.

“You’ve got to make sure you’re not just sending them from your shelter to some other animal warehouse.”

It’s hard to overstate how particular wildlife can be.

At the California Wildlife Center, Becky Duerr recently had to improvise a diet for a rare and injured poorwill, a shy little bird with horny tufts of feathers and a mouth that opens like a scoop.

“They only catch insects on the wing, so we have to force-feed him,” she said.

But the labor of catching individual insects and forcing them down the throat of such a delicate-boned animal was too exacting. So Duerr logged onto chat rooms on the Internet, found a poorwill expert and got tips for creating an artificial food substitute that would provide the requisite nutrients.

In the little veterinary clinic in the basement of the cabin, near the illuminated X-rays of squirrels, she mixed a certain brand of cat food with vitamins and minerals and, voila, dejeuner pour le poorwill.

There is a long list of do’s and don’ts you learn in a rehab clinic, where every patient has its own medical chart.

You do not put certain insect-eating birds under fluorescent light because they see with such acuity that they perceive the light as a strobe, which essentially drives them nuts.

You do need to be careful when releasing most reptiles back in the wild because they can get sick in captivity and spread disease.

You must learn to feed a coyote so that it does not see you and get used to humans. This requires specially designed cages, where the food is dropped through a chute.

“It’s illegal to release a habituated animal back into the wild,” Frank said. “It’s not good PR for the species.

If you have a coyote coming around people’s houses like a dog because he doesn’t know any better, he’s more likely to get shot or hit by a car.”

Frank said the main thing he needs are more volunteers and funding to build more cages for a growing number of animals. “There’s such an increase of wildlife landing in people’s hands because of development,” he said.

The animals seem to come in waves. Recent lists show about two dozen patients in the center’s care at any one time. They are mostly birds, including one turkey vulture, one sora, four doves and four pelicans, as well as two brush rabbits and one dragonfly.

Dragonfly?

Well, not really.

“OK, I was sitting at Starbucks,” Duerr admitted, “and it landed on my table and I let it out the door.”