An Animal Rescuer’s Life on the Wild Side

Kathleen Ramsay doesn’t scare easily.

Two years ago, the wildlife veterinarian climbed a 100-foot tree to rescue a bobcat cub, and almost made it down with the wriggling baby before a branch snapped and she fell to the ground, breaking her back.

“Cowabunga!” she said, describing the sickening splat that led to a two-year recovery. The paramedics “were just scared to death of that bobcat,” Ramsay said, her face crinkling in a smile.

So went another evening at work for Ramsay, who has devoted her life to saving New Mexico’s wild creatures one turkey vulture and black bear at a time. The Los Alamos native founded the Wildlife Center in 1986 in the 500-square-foot home she lived in then. About 20,000 rehabilitated animals later, Ramsay’s passion has turned her fledgling clinic into New Mexico’s only treatment facility for all species of injured or abandoned wildlife, which in December expanded into a 5,000-square-foot building on 20 acres with a mountain view.

Ramsay does veterinary duty at the center free while maintaining her own domestic animal private practice. She sets aside every other afternoon and weekend plus numerous evenings to tend to her wild charges.

To cram it all in, the 5-foot-3 animal doctor works 80-hour weeks and sleeps little. Her precise age, probably about 50, she keeps a mystery: “That’s a secret of life,” she said. “I’m a young whippersnapper.”

Ramsay is one link in a network of nearly 12,000 wildlife rehabilitators nationwide, according to estimates by the nonprofit organization WildAgain Wildlife Rehabilitation, which tracks the field. The bulk of the rehabilitators -- up to 90% -- care for animals on their own time at home. To obtain a rehab license, states have differing requirements, which sometimes include apprenticeships with veterinarians.

“We’re going through a great growth period right now,” said Lee Hiestand, public relations chairwoman for the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Assn. in Minnesota. “We’re maturing into a real profession.”

Many veterinary schools now teach wildlife care, classes that weren’t offered decades ago, said Erica Miller, staff veterinarian for the Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research Inc., a rehabilitation center in Delaware.

Although some states such as California, New York and Ohio have extensive networks for wildlife care, New Mexico -- the nation’s second-poorest state -- has fewer resources at its disposal.

The Wildlife Center runs on a $336,000 annual budget, an occasional $2,000 of which comes from New Mexico’s Department of Game and Fish. That’s dwarfed by places like a new $1-million wildlife hospital being built in Huntington Beach -- with $600,000 from California. That facility will have a $500,000 budget and room for more than 10,000 animals when completed this year.

“We do what we can with what we have ... ,” Ramsay said. “I’ve had to work with so little for so long, it’s amazing what our facility can do.”

With five times the space of the former clinic, the new location is filling up.

Ramsay’s energy -- plus fundraising by executive director Pam Everson -- helped propel the Wildlife Center. Last summer, the organization leased the land and buildings of a former fairgrounds from the Bureau of Land Management for $10,500, with an option to buy for $150,000 as early as June. The land was cleared, the buildings renovated or scrapped, and fences and cages were constructed.

“It’s bliss,” Ramsay said of the facility, which, for the first time, will have enough space to welcome the public. One of the center’s key missions is to educate adults and children about wildlife.

Everson said that emphasis on education outweighed the center’s rehabilitation efforts. “The educational message, it’s a larger message -- that humans and wildlife are able to coexist ... to get folks in the state to function as stewards of their own ecosystem,” she said.

Ramsay leads her paid staff of five and group of 140 volunteers in caring for whatever comes through the door. Patients have included a gull-like parasitic jaeger blown from the Pacific or the Gulf of Mexico in a hurricane, two ornery tusked baby javelinas -- cousins of the wild pig -- orphaned when their mother was struck by a car, and a bald eagle that crash-landed and needed 21 bone fragments to be set with titanium pins, bolts and screws.

The center’s patient survival rate is about 55%, near the national average rate of two-thirds, as tracked by WildAgain.

Although Ramsay grew up with a horse, dogs, cats and “anything [she] could smuggle into the bedroom,” she didn’t settle on veterinary medicine until her junior year at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, where she was studying biochemistry and metallurgy. In 1977, she was accepted to Colorado State University’s veterinary program.

A turning point came during her first year of vet school, when a man brought her an eagle caught in a trap. “That poor bird was just dangling and flapping in the trap.... That was the day that did me in for wildlife,” Ramsay said. Moved by the bird’s suffering, Ramsay said she “decided that the one thing I wanted to do was make a difference for these animals.... If I could teach one kid every year the value of the animals they have around them, I’ve done my work in society.”

She came to love raptors -- eagles, hawks and other birds of prey -- and specialized in treating and rehabilitating them. She soon expanded her wildlife center and medical expertise to treat all species.

“If I did anything with my life, I wanted to give wildlife a second chance,” said Ramsay, subject of a 1994 nonfiction children’s book, “Wildlife Rescue: The Work of Dr. Kathleen Ramsay,” written and photographed by friends who support the Wildlife Center.

She spent part of her teenage years in Saudi Arabia with her hydrologist father who worked there, and has traveled to Brazil to work with jaguars as part of an ecotourism project. She returned to her beloved northern New Mexico after an early-1980s vet stint in Salem, Ore. She chose Espanola because of its proximity to the mountains and its desperate need for local veterinary care.

Ramsay’s devotion to her charges has kept her rooted in Espanola, a town of 10,000 where more than a fifth of the residents live in poverty. Her house has been broken into four times, the vet clinic more times than Ramsay can count. Four years ago, vandals raided the bear rehabilitation area and pried open pens, releasing two bears and three bobcats; she and her husband spent the next day tracking footprints to recover them.

Her husband, Lou Horak, and 15-year-old son, Ty, have become more or less accustomed to the chaos of life with wild animals; in the summer’s busy season, Ramsay’s house fills with overflow creatures like raccoons and bobcats. “They begin to get really annoyed,” she said of her family.

Once, Ramsay said, an owl, loose in the house, mistook her snoozing husband’s twitching mustache for an animal and attacked his face, jolting him from his nap. Owls are now banned from Ramsay’s home, which is decorated with likenesses of raptors.

Locals haven’t always been receptive to her animal-friendly cause.

Some in Espanola were skeptical of the untamed -- and potentially dangerous -- neighbors that would come with the center, and worried about attacks, said Mayor Richard Lucero. “When they found out that it was rehabilitation of wild animals and returning them to their natural habitat, they changed their attitude,” he said.

Out of the windows of the salmon-colored adobe building that houses the Wildlife Center, Ramsay and her colleagues see nothing but opportunity in the reddish mesas and scrub brush that stretch beyond.

There is no question why Ramsay is here.

“You watch that bird play in the winds and feel the air currents under its wings,” she said, “and the tears come to your eyes every time you do it.

“You think, because of me, that bird had a second chance.”