A Wing (And) a Prayer

Rescue season is in full chorus at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum.

I am standing in the examining room of the Lindsay Wildlife Museum’s veterinary hospital.

Tiny pet carriers and tinier brown paper bags line each of the room’s two long counters. Nine people—some staff, some volunteers—dance around the room, feeding baby birds, medicating baby birds, grabbing equipment, looking for equipment, bringing in carriers, taking out carriers, and somehow keeping track of the whole business of saving wildlife on one small white board mounted on a cupboard door.

Peeps, beeps, trills, whistles, squawks, squeaks, quacks, and yells fill the room, the product of an orphan chorus of about two dozen juvenile creatures brought in for care by the general public. It is a lovely sound—until I hear, I swear, “Meeoooww.”

I freeze, scanning the room for what would surely be an unwelcome intruder. Neither the humans nor the orphan chorus seem perturbed by the sound, and I wonder if I’m hearing things. Yet again, a harsh “Meooww” cuts through the bird sounds. This time, I locate its source—a cardboard pet carrier on the floor. I sidle over as an interning veterinary student opens the carrier. Inside, I see a baby crow with its long beak gaping open in an obvious demand for food. “They meow like cats when they’re hungry at this age,” the student explains.

The baby crow is just one of 6,000 injured or orphaned animals that come into the Lindsay Museum’s hospital each year, and one of the constant flood that arrives each spring. “Sometimes we have a line going all the way out the front door,” says Sherrill Cook, director of external affairs for the museum (and the resident owl specialist). “We can get a hundred animals a day during May and June.”

Those animals arrive with a wide range of issues. On the day that I visit, for instance, the hospital takes in an American kestrel that sustained both head trauma and a lacerated wing by flying into a window; a baby red-shouldered hawk and a baby barn owl, both still fluffy, which fell out of their nests; a mallard duckling that keeps falling over; an adult screech owl that got disoriented and started pecking on someone’s front door; three baby raccoons found in a cut-down tree; a baby flycatcher that knocked itself out in someone’s garage; and a young grosbeak attacked by a cat.

That’s just in the first hour.

I restrain myself from oohing and aahing over the sheer cuteness of these little critters, although as a fledgling birder, I can’t help murmuring at the opportunity to see these species up close. But, when the vet student opens the carrier with the baby raccoons, I inadvertently gasp. He looks up and cautions, “We don’t say cute here. We say ‘aesthetically pleasing.’ ”

Indeed, the 350 volunteers at the hospital are carefully trained to avoid bonding with the animals, especially the raptors and the mammals because they can so easily become accustomed to humans. Some birds of prey are fed by volunteers dressed in camouflage suits to disguise their human features.

The hospital, which opened in 1970, has only one full-time veterinarian and four full-time wildlife supervisors, so it relies chiefly on volunteers. Other community support is also invaluable. Most of the food for the hospital, for instance, is donated: Trader Joe’s brings its cracked eggs, neighbors bring food from farmers markets, and various animal control agencies donate roadkill picked up on their beats. And, on occasion, a tree service will let the museum use a tree-pruning truck to return a baby owl to the nest from which it was blown. “There’s really no other way to get them back up,” Cook notes ruefully.

About half of the animals taken in are released back into the wild. The rest die (or are euthanized), are transferred to other rescue organizations or animal shelters, or go to educational programs. “The sad stories are hard,” Cook says. “But the happy story is that so many people are willing to help wildlife that’s in trouble. That’s what keeps us going. And, our sense is also that people are getting to know more and more about how to protect wildlife in their backyards.”

For information on the Lindsay Wildlife Museum, including instructions on how to deal with injured or orphaned species, go to www.wildlife-museum.org.