Wildlife Rescue Series!

It’s Sunday night and I’m pretending it’s Thursday. It’s been that kind of week. The coming week promises to be no saner. We launch Crow Medicine in Vancouver this Friday, and until the RSVPs, food, drinks, music, book sales and posters are finalized and my speech is planned and I know what I’m wearing, I probably won’t relax too much. Oh, the glamour.

Thursday was my first shift back at the Wildlife Rescue Centre (WRA) in a very long time. Speaking of glamour, I’d managed to forget just how much fecal matter is an integral part of every shift. Honestly though, it felt great to put on old shoes, baggy jeans and a sweatshirt and get really dirty.

Two new volunteers have joined the Thursday morning crew since I’ve been away, and they did most of the work while I bumbled around refamiliarizing myself with the routines. M was on holidays in California, but G was there, gamely managing the outside pens on her own, as usual. She’s still in pain with severe arthritis, but she’s been back at the Centre for a few weeks now. Faced with a choice between being in pain or being isolated at home, she chose the pain … and the animals.

In the exam room, D was giving a bufflehead a final once-over and his last dose of medication before putting him under observation in preparation for release. Part way through our rounds in the care room, R discovered that one of the rock pigeons, alive on first inspection that morning, had died quietly in its cage. Not ten minutes later, I found the pigeon in the adjoining cage dead as well. It had survived a house fire the previous night and been brought to the Centre by an especially compassionate fireman. We finished rounds in a sober mood.

Then D called us to the exam room to watch the banding of a juvenile red-tailed hawk. What an animal. Full sized despite its juvenile designation; what gave away its age was the mottled feathering on its breast and wings, and the fact that its tail isn’t red yet. D placed it in a wing wrap to protect its wing feathers during the procedure, and covered its head to help calm it. Using a small metal device edged with several sizes of semi-circular cutouts, D measured the circumference of one of its legs and chose the appropriately sized band.

The bands for the red-tails are specially designed to lock; clever, determined and well equipped with a sharply hooked beak, a red-tail can easily pry open a standard band. Using the appropriate banding tool, D closed and locked the band over red-tail’s right leg. He would be released later in the afternoon. Our mood lifted. The release was a reminder of why we were there, of why it was all worth it — the arthritis pain, the mess and smells, the deaths.

Once the animals were fed and cleaned and medicated as necessary, I drifted over to the house to help G sort and count Canadian Tire money. I always think it would amaze most people to know what it costs to operate a small, volunteer-based wildlife rehab centre for a year. It’s also amazing to see some of the resourceful ways in which the organization comes up with the cash (or equivalent) to do so. Absolutely everything comes from donations from the public — money, yes, but also everything from fish to blankets to bird seed to Canadian Tire dollars. The wish list is usually a mile long, and often includes things like computers and incubators, but somehow we always seem to have everything we need … or manage with all that we have.
I met J in the garden as we were getting ready to leave, and looked up to see a raven fly over us, soaring open-winged on the slightest of breezes, huge, silent.

A blessing.