Wildlife Rescue Series!

The chances of survival for a sick, injured or pollution-damaged wild animal can be greatly increased by the response of the person who finds it — that could be you!

First of all, you’ll need your own Rescue Kit:

1. a clean, ventilated box that can be securely closed, or a cage or kennel with a solid floor
2. some old, clean towels and blankets
3. an electric heating pad
4. work gloves (to keep you safe!)

Line the box or cage with a soft, clean towel, have a second towel on hand for wrapping the animal, and keep another large towel aside for creating a drape to cover the box once the animal is inside.

When you find a sick or injured animal, wear your gloves and wrap the animal gently in a light-coloured towel, making sure to cover its head to reduce stress.

Place the animal in the lined container, releasing it from the wrap as you do so. Cover the box with the drape, and call your local wildlife rehabilitation centre for further instructions.

If it is after hours, keep the animal warm by placing the covered box on a heating pad on LOW. Do not touch or talk to the animal, or give it anything to eat or drink. Keep it in a room separate from your pets. The next morning, take the animal directly to your wildlife rehabilitator, knowing you’ve played your part in that animal’s rescue!

Things to Remember:

• Wild mammals and even birds can be dangerous, especially when cornered and injured. Call your local wildlife centre to discuss the situation and find out how to proceed safely!
• Stress is the biggest danger to wildlife in captivity. If you’re a compassionate person, you’ll want to pet and talk to the animal, but resist! Petting and being talked to are completely unnatural for a wild animal, and can be terrifying, or even fatal.
• The faster you can get the animal to a wildlife rehabilitation facility, the better its chances for survival.
• Do not try to treat the animal yourself! Professional rehabilitators have years of training, as well as access to appropriate diets, caging and medical care.
• If you can get an animal to a wildlife rehabilitation centre safely, you’ve done your part!

Time Magazine released its list of the world’s 100 most influential people this week, along with profiles of leaders in each category: Leaders and Revolutionaries; Heroes and Pioneers; Scientists and Thinkers; Artists and Entertainers; Builders and Titans. I read the whole article–59 pages–in one sitting, and came away with an idea.

See, the way my brain works, everything is connected. So when I read about these phenomenal filmmakers, CEOs, authors, philanthropists, technology gurus, Internet wizards and bloggers, politicians, scientists, comedians and everyday heroes all at the same time, my brain needed the collection to add up to something, to tell a story. That’s what my brain does: it makes stories out of the apparently unconnected.

So this is a letter for Al Gore of An Inconvenient Truth; Steve Jobs of Apple; Rhonda Byrne of The Secret; Oprah Winfrey of just about everything; international gamer Fatal1ty and Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto; Lonelygirl15 producer Miles Beckett and YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Steve Chen; Philip Rosedale, builder of Second Life; and Pony Ma, creator of China’s Internet community QQ:

The most powerful people in the world understand that what you focus on grows and becomes your reality. My driving instructor put it very simply back when I was 17: “Where you look, you go.” Just try driving straight ahead while you’re gazing off to the left. Actually, don’t try it. But you get my point. And the more your focus occupies the totality of your being–mind, body, spirit–the more powerful a creator you become. Where you look, you go.

I read recently about a video game that lets players try to bring peace to the Middle East. What I want to know, Time 100, is whether we could use interactive, user-driven media to REALLY bring peace to the Middle East. And Darfur. And solutions to the planet’s environmental problems. Peace and safety to suffering and endangered animals. Healing to the ill. Food to the hungry. Abundance to the poor.
If we connect The Secret to video games, for example, especially Wii, where the players are physically engaged in the game, aren’t we looking at practising (at least at the levels of mind and body) a certain way of being?

So couldn’t we practise peace and environmental problem-solving? If it’s a game we’re playing, theoretically, this could be fun.
And couldn’t we do it in multi-gamer situations? From a spiritual perspective, it’s believed that when several people are gathered together for a common purpose, the power of that gathering is even greater than the sum of the individuals’ power. To put it in the vernacular, two minds (or more) are better than one. Imagine whole online communities of people from all over the globe working together in cyber-reality to solve the biggest “problems” of our time. And they’re playing. They’re having fun. They don’t make decisions out of fear, because the consequences play themselves out in pictures and pixels only, and dire results can be changed with the click of a mouse. The freedom to make mistakes, learn from them, and then practise something better–ideal.

What if we connected The Secret to Second Life? Gave people with life-threatening illnesses the opportunity to create avatars of themselves, see themselves healthy again in real time, in life size. To move freely, to run and jump and play again. What if?

There are people in the Time 100 list with a vision that could carry the world and all of us in it forward together to a better way of being, individually, in community, in our international relations and in our relationship with the world herself. In fact, many of them share a similar vision. What we need to do now is make it “real”–words, pictures, online videos, avatars, games–and make it available for all of us to play with, practise with, become accustomed to, share, inhabit … make Real.

Where you look, you go. Time 100, together you can provide both the roadmap and the vehicle. There are millions of us who will be only too happy to get in and drive. And I’m willing to bet that when we do–enough of us, for enough time–we will find that what we practise over and over again in cyberspace becomes manifest in the space all around us. Becomes real.

This morning’s edition of The Vancouver Sun contains a full page of readers’ letters commenting on Saturday’s paper, the “green” issue, edited by David Suzuki. And now I am basking in a guilty pleasure: that of discovering that I was not the only person who felt so overwhelmed by all that green goodness that I couldn’t even read it.

Bleaghhh!

I don’t blame the Sun. The environment is the number-one issue around the globe, and it made sense socially, editorially and fiscally to place their bets on Suzuki for a day. He’s Canada’s Patron Saint of Green, and his messages are crucial. (Of course, they have been for the past 20 years.) And there were good writers featured, and likely some great pieces. But I was on overdose by page two. The great pieces languished while I ran outside to play.
I don’t blame Suzuki either. Given a chance like that–to be the city’s Thought Director for a day–well, I’d jump at it, too.

But everybody knows better. The media know better. We know better. We know about media saturation … and over-saturation. We know about brand overexposure. And by putting out an edition like Saturday’s, we’re ignoring what we know and shoving the brand down everybody’s throat, extra helpings, and green tea ice cream for dessert.

Because the environment HAS become a brand. And that’s good news! It’s on the radar, big time, and people who have been ignorant of it til now are actually taking action. Those of us who’ve been green for a while have felt inspired to do even more. It’s cool to be green.

But cool is ephemeral, and now that the environment is at the top of the charts, it has nowhere to go but down. The trouble is, we can’t afford to let it fall. It’s one chart-topper that has to stay there … for everybody’s sake.

Which means it has to stay cool. Which means we have to stay interested, curious, inspired.

Which means enough with the boiled broccoli. That’s not how we like our greens.

Give me stories any day: Barbara Kingsolver’s books (any of them but especially Prodigal Summer); Carl Hiaasen’s eco-adventures for both teens and adults; E.B. White’s classics, subtle and profound.

Those of us who care, and who’ve cared for a while, do so because of the stories we’ve internalized, stories about animals’ lives and animals who’ve become part of people’s lives. We do so because we’ve seen a bit of the world, a beautiful bit, and come to love it. What we cherish, we will protect.

Read books. Share the stories with a friend. Take a walk, plant a garden, cherish the little plot of land you call home. Learn what you can, and strive to make a difference based on what you’ve learned.

Tell your own story.

Bonzo called in a panic on Sunday. “Hey, bird lady! Help me! There’s a baby robin on my grass that fell out of its nest and I don’t know what to do? CALL ME!”

It may be of interest to some readers to know that Bonzo (the Great), one of my best friends literally since birth (our mothers went to school together and got pregnant at almost exactly the same time … coincidence? we think not!), is the primary real-life model for the character of Amy in Jane Ray’s Wildlife Rescue Series. Except Amy is a little more buxom than Bonzo is.

Bonzo’s going to kill me for that.

So I came home to find that message on my voicemail, along with a second, even more despairing one:

“Buffi! [That’s me.] CALL ME! I’ve been attacked! I picked the baby robin up in a towel so I wouldn’t touch it so the parents wouldn’t reject it, and tried to put it back in the nest, and the parents attacked me! They’re evil! I freaked out and left the baby in the grass. Now one of the psycho parents has hopped down to the other end of the yard, and the baby went with it. It can’t fly! It’ll never get back into the nest! Buffi, call me! CALL…” BEEP.

I called.

And here’s what I said:

“Bonz, turn to your Flory’s Files, girlfriend! Everything you need to know about rescuing a baby bird is right there at the back of Crow Medicine!” Okay, I was a bit more helpful than that.
And now, here’s EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT RESCUING A BABY BIRD:

Wild bird babies should be with their parents. Animal parents do a much better job of raising their young than humans can (so don’t think you’ve just found a new pet!). If you find a nestling:

1. Try to locate the nest, and gently place the bird in it. Be gentle, but don’t worry about touching the baby with your bare hands. It’s a myth that bird parents will reject a baby handled by humans. (However, mammals are a very different story!)

2. Watch for the parent. If the parent does not return within two hours, the baby may be orphaned. If the parents attack, as they did with Bonzo, try to understand that they’re just doing their job–trying to protect the fallen baby and the babies still in the nest. Don’t attack back, but if it helps, do what Bonzo did, and put on a hat and sunglasses to protect yourself from pecks and scratches.

3. If the baby appears to be orphaned, call your nearest wildlife rescue centre for further instructions (you have the number posted near your phone, right?).

4. If the nest has been destroyed, fashion a makeshift nest for your baby bird and call your wildlife centre for help.

5. If you can’t locate the nest, contact your wildlife centre and take the baby bird there. Use a small, lined box with breathing holes poked into the lid. The baby cannot survive without its parents and will need the help of a professional rehabilitator.

Next post: How to tell a nestling from a fledgling, and what to do if you find a fledgling!

“If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.”

Historian Howard Zinn in The Optimism of Uncertainty, as quoted in Geoff Olson’s magnificent essay “May Day Mayhem” in this month’s issue of Common Ground