Wildlife Rescue

Lindsay Wildlife Museum (Walnut Creek, California) is a five-minute drive from my home. Every year, thousands of injured or orphaned birds, raccoons, possums, deer, and even snakes are brought in by caring citizens. I volunteer in the wildlife hospital there three hours a week, doing mostly unglamorous tasks: cleaning cages, doing laundry, cutting up fruit. Occasionally I get to do more interesting things, such as holding a bird that is having blood drawn for a diagnostic test. The animals are treated and most of them are eventually released back into nature.

Taking care of mice.  The mice are being raised as food for the raptors (mostly hawks) that we are rescuing. There’s no way to rescue carnivorous animals without giving them flesh to eat. One has to choose. So though I’m a vegetarian, I take part in a tiny meat industry, raising and feeding generations of little white mice. Once a day, mouse enclosures have to be cleaned out, supplied with new sawdust, and provided with fresh food and water.

Baby mice are called “pinkies” because they are pink and miniscule when first born, about half the size of your smallest finger. Their limbs are almost invisible. Their skin is almost transparent; after they’ve had their milk, you can see the brilliant white blob inside their stomachs. Today I noticed that you can also see through the skin on the tops of their heads - the skull bones are not fused and the fissures are plainly visible, like teensy pink boundary lines on a map.

By the time they are toddlers, mice have grown a fine coating of fur, and before long they’re as white as their parents and the other mice in their enclosures. I haven’t found out yet - do some adult mice forego parenthood in order to help the pack reproduce? This is what some canids and felids do in the wild. It baffled sociobiologists for a while, for it seemed to fly in the face of their “selfish gene” theory.  Pregnant mice, in the later stages, seem to be as wide as they are long. No wonder - they’re carrying as many as a dozen babies inside.

We handle the mice to clean their cages. There’s something very endearing about the tiny feet clinging to one’s gloved hand, the white whiskers. I don’t participate in killing the mice. A painless dose of carbon dioxide knocks them out. Sadly, a few are chosen to be the prey that the young raptors (birds of prey) must practice killing before they can be released. This is one thing that churns my stomach about nature: though animals aren’t recreationally aggressive like humans, there is killing involved in feeding. The living feed on other living things, and predator mothers must teach their young how to kill in order to live. A cheetah will bring home a living warthog baby, for instance, and let her cubs chase it. I feel so sorry for the little creature that keeps trying to escape, and almost making it, and suffering in fear for so long before it is dispatched.

Birds.  LWM receives thousands of birds every year. In the spring, the bird room is loud with the racket of chickadees, cedar waxwings, house finches, doves, and robins chirping and flapping.   In mid-summer the bird room was fully occupied.  Every cage, three shelves high, was tenanted by one or more birds, some of them tiny babies. We are kept busy feeding every bird with mash which we poked into their mouths from plastic syringes. Some birds flee from our hands as we reached into the cages to deliver the goods, but a few cocky ones get right in line for their lunch. Rarely one sits on your hand or the syringe itself. Reaching into the cage is usually easy, since a small flap of mesh hangs over the door. When one does manage to escape, the procedure is to call, “Bird out!” and turn out the lights. There are nets on handles to catch them. The bird room is small, so this is not usually difficult.

One day a bird escaped and fluttered about near the ceiling. The tallest of the volunteers simply reached up and with one hand caught the bird right out of the air.  I was astounded; it was as if the laws of nature had been repealed. Pulling a bird out of the air!  The following week another bird escaped and flew up to the ceiling, and the second tallest person in the room…  reached up and caught it. Darn, I thought. I’ll never be able to do that. I’m too short. The week after that, I was standing on a stepstool to feed the youngest birds on the highest shelf of cages when, surprise, a bird escaped. I was ready… reached out… and caught it.

A wildlife hospital kitchen.  In one refrigerator, there is meat for the rescues (our temporary guests) and for the  “animal ambassadors” upstairs that are unreleasable (and therefore permanent residents). Imagine opening a fridge door and finding a vat full of dead rats, complete with tails. Or would you prefer half-rats? Moistened mashed dog food. Half carcasses of birds. Plastic packages with dozens of mice. The other fridge looks more familiar, with piles of fresh fruits and vegetables and cans of infant milk substitute.  In the adjacent room are large vats on wheels, labeled “dove seed” “rodent block” and “crickets.” On the counter sit two bins full of sawdust in which mealworms crawl around.

The walk-in freezer scares me. I’ve heard of too many tales of people locked inside dungeon-like industrial facilities.  Even the reassurance that there’s a knob inside doesn’t eliminate the fear of being caught up in a Hitchcock-like terror scene.

Speaking of volunteering, where are all the men when it’s time to save the earth? I have never been to an environmental or animal event where women didn’t outnumber men by about six to one. What do men do all night and weekend, when women are volunteering, organizing, doing local politics, educating their communities, saving animals, and making the world a better place? Ok, playing basketball with the boys is healthy exercise and anything that burns off the male hormones is good, but what about the rest of their non-work time? ………….   I’m waiting for an answer.

One night I learned how to handle raptors (kestrels, owls, hawks). The hospital hopes to keep handling to a minimum since it’s stressful for the birds, but at admission they have to be weighed, given medical treatment, banded, and then put into a cage. Depending on how injured they are and how long their stay, they may also have to be brought out for more treatment or blood draws, and eventually (happy day) they are transferred to a portable carrier, taken to a release site, and let go. So along with twenty other volunteers, I watched a demonstration on how to catch, hold, and transfer the bird. Then the whole class got to practice. Fortunately, some sweet tame chickens were on hand. We put on heavy leather gloves, ascertained the position of the chicken in the carrier, opened the carrier while making sure the chicken could not escape, reached in and gently but firmly pinned the bird to the floor of the carrier, reached underneath to grasp the feet, and triumphantly lifted our prize. The primary skill, I think, is balancing caution and confidence (true in most areas of life).

Not having seen live chickens at the hospital in the year I’ve been volunteering, I asked whether these had been brought in for our edification. Yes, but…. they were also intended as food for the unreleasable mountain lion that lives upstairs. I looked sadly at these patient birds, who had let us clumsy beginners take them in and out of the carriers repeatedly for half an hour. Of course there’s no life without death, no carnivore without prey, no beautiful big cat without its food, but it’s still hard to know this feathered creature I’ve held is condemned to die in a few minutes. Quickly and painlessly, but still…. The Buddhist philosophy of acceptance and detachment (not the same as indifference) is admirable and profound, but I find it hard to remember when an animal dies.