10,000 Birds

JULY 17, 2015

Do you know how many times a day wildlife rehabilitators say that, especially in the summer? Click here for a wild ride – complete with both photographs and videos – through Vonda’s week, and if you’d like a positive ID on the babe pictured at right. Hey – I’m not the only rehabber out here. (Do

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Rescue Wildlife Wildlife Rehabilitation Georgia 229

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 9, 2013

Two days ago I went on Facebook and queried some of my exhausted compatriots: if you could have one wish right now – anything in the world – what would it be? “I They’d also have to pay for every aspect of care the injured bird requires, as well as the emotional suffering of the wildlife rehabilitator!”.

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Wildlife Wildlife Rehabilitation Oklahoma New York 246

10,000 Birds

APRIL 5, 2013

Even the most touchy-feely, circle-of-lifey, we’re-all-one-with-nature wildlife rehabilitators hate them. I arrived home with a nice inch-long incision right between my eyebrows, and found a car parked in my driveway. I had her wrapped in a towel and was giving her the once-over when … right! I hate them. Flat flies!

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Wildlife Rehabilitation Vet Abandon Abandoning 237

10,000 Birds

MAY 22, 2015

What do you do when you – a citizen whose rights are protected by the U.S. This is what we need for birds, whose rights as government-protected species are violated every day by free-roaming cats. Enough hand-wringing, enough taking butchered birds to exhausted, emotionally drained wildlife rehabilitators.

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Feral Cats Feral Cats Wildlife Rehabilitation 259

10,000 Birds

MAY 6, 2016

I asked a group of wildlife rehabilitators: “What are some of the Worst Bird Myths? So right from the beginning, none of this makes any sense. An injured or orphaned bird must be taken to a wildlife rehabilitator as soon as humanly possible, or they will have little chance of surviving. Feel free to vent!”.

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Wildlife Rehabilitation Porcupines Raccoons Birds 178

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 12, 2016

Today’s blog was written by Kathy Hershey, co-founder of Utopia Wildlife Rehabilitators in Hope, Indiana. Because he’ll always want to seek kids and shoelaces and risk danger to himself, Parker has a new life at our wildlife rehabilitation center, and his story puts a face on these amazing birds.

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Wildlife Rehabilitation Mice Indiana Game 132

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 5, 2012

There are few sights more wrenching to a wildlife rehabilitator than a convulsing, lead-poisoned bird. In what some might see as an unlikely alliance, wildlife rehabilitators, veterinarians, and – yes – hunters have banded together to convince those who hunt to use copper bullets instead of lead.

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Hunters Wildlife Rehabilitation Hunting Legislation 179

10,000 Birds

JULY 12, 2013

She’s right there in Ossining.”. No other wildlife rehabilitators could respond to the call, and Lisa was two hours away. Birds Cooper''s Hawks eagles wildlife rehabilitates' “Oh, great,” I said. But what about Erin? Erin Baker is another rehabber, as well as the Environmental Educator at Teatown Lake Reservation.

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Eagles Wildlife Rehabilitation Bald Eagle Ecuador 185

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 20, 2013

The trap had been set in the woods right next to my house. I knew the wildlife. A recent thread on my Raptorcare listserv produced one wildlife rehabilitator’s nightmarish photo of a leghold trap firmly clutching the leg of a Great Horned Owl. The name and town of the owner were engraved on a metal tag.

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Wildlife Rehabilitation Rhode Island New Jersey Wildlife 230

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 20, 2015

Question: What’s one of the best things about being a wildlife rehabilitator? He fashioned a wooden stand with right angle uprights, each cut to accommodate the end of a very nice red wine bottle torso. Answer: The presents you get from friends who are trying to distract you from all the stress in your life.

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Wildlife Rehabilitation Wildlife Rights Birds 153

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 15, 2014

My very first rescue was a House Sparrow caught in a glue trap,” says Donna Osburn, a wildlife rehabilitator in Kentucky. The Barn Swallow at right was rescued by Rebecca Dmytryk of Wildlife Emergency Services in Moss Landing, California, and transferred to Native Songbird Care and Conservation in Sebastopol.

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Wildlife Rehabilitation Mice Rodents Rescue 279

10,000 Birds

MAY 23, 2013

I called my wildlife rehabilitator friend Maggie Ciarcia, who, yes, has rehabbed baby wild mice before. I glanced ahead of me and right in the middle of the trail was the bag, with perfect crow-sized beak holes in three different places. Birds crows mice wildlife rehabilitator' This had never happened before.

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Mice Wildlife Rehabilitation Wildlife Family 171

Reddit Animals

JULY 26, 2023

Im not on Reddit much so I hope this is the right place but i need some help w baby birds ! Somewhat time sensitive last night coming home these baby birds in a nest right by our porch got spooked by something and just sort of jumped out. My mom kept trying to put them back in the nest but they kept falling back out.

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Wildlife Rehabilitation Birds Cats Rights 40

10,000 Birds

MARCH 14, 2014

“Here’s an idea for a blog,” wrote Donna Osburn, a wildlife rehabilitator from Kentucky. He was right! The best I could do was to finally acknowledge that a swallow was LIKE a falcon, sort of, a predator, and winged insects are sort of like birds, as prey, sort of … right?”. “I This is a great topic. Can you ID?”.

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Wildlife Wildlife Rehabilitation Falcons Pit Bulls 250

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 24, 2014

So I asked seven wildlife rehabilitators, “Tell me your favorite (or one of your favorites) release story – the kind that makes you keep going, in spite of everything.”. “A The first thing he did was to greet the flock that was resting on the sand, then he turned right around, took a long bath, and went back to them.

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Wildlife Rehabilitation Ohio Tulsa West Virginia 222

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 6, 2013

Wildlife rehabilitators are not known for our bling. As for nice clothing … right! People who work with wildlife wearing nice clothes? Birds American Crow Bald Eagle brown-headed cowbird great-horned owls Red-tailed Hawk sandhill crane wildlife rehabilitators'

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Bald Eagle Wildlife Rehabilitation Vet Birds 222

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 25, 2013

As the cadet tells the camera, “I’m relieved … but I’m kinda sad, too, I just got to know him,” a hawk enters, stage left, grabs the mouse, and exits, stage right. “No!” My heart goes out to the cadet (the hawk is probably awfully fond of him right now, too). cries the cadet. “He He didn’t even last five minutes!”.

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Wildlife Rehabilitation Coyotes Wounded Rabbits 164

10,000 Birds

APRIL 8, 2016

Injured wildlife are not the most cooperative of patients. Wildlife rehabilitators have an arsenal of equipment and techniques we use to protect ourselves. Yeah right! Right now I have a nice hickey on my arm from a Canada Goose. They don’t love us like we love them, right? We felt so bad for her.

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Wildlife Rehabilitation Wounded Wildlife Opossums 167

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 10, 2012

Not having a smart phone, I called a friend in New York and had him Google up some wildlife rehabilitators’ numbers, but they were all out of service. Leaving it there did not seem like a good option. A different Hoary Bat, on a better day. It turns out, helping a bat is hard. Animal Control was on the way.

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Bats Wildlife Rehabilitation Missouri Montana 134

10,000 Birds

MARCH 27, 2015

Once an Augur Buzzard swooped over our heads and landed in a tree right above us. Birding bird rehabilitator mongoose Tanzanian birding wildlife rehabilitators' Suzie is very happy now, yes?” he grinned, speaking with his irresistibly precise, clipped accent. But that was seven years ago.

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Mongoose Chickens India Wildlife Rehabilitation 187

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 18, 2014

Only several dozen of these swans wintered in the region (the region being, approximately, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming) and for some reason they were almost all at this river in this year, and on this day, they were right there in view. Of course there were other Trumpeter Swans out there, but not many. Canada has more than the US.

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Minnesota Wounded Wildlife Rehabilitation Montana 211

10,000 Birds

JUNE 5, 2015

Wildlife rehabilitators are a multi-tasking lot. THEY’VE BEEN FEEDING HIM LOW-SALT HAM,” she wrote, all in caps, then added some choice commentary which I can’t seem to locate right now, but which inspired all her rehabber friends to add their two cents. “A The baffling, mind-boggling public. wrote Maryjane Angelo.

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Squirrels Hamburgers Chickens Wildlife Rehabilitation 250

10,000 Birds

JUNE 1, 2012

This story comes from Lisa Kelly, a wildlife rehabilitator in Tarrytown, New York, by way of Maggie Ciarcia, a rehabber in the nearby town of Somers. It’s right there near the train tracks. Maggie received a call one morning from an elderly woman named Katherine. I hope you can get to the poor creature. I’m so worried about it.

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Rescue Bird Rescue Wildlife Rehabilitation Birds 178

10,000 Birds

MAY 20, 2014

yanked the steering wheel to the right, slammed on my brakes, grabbed my binoculars, and threw myself out of the car. The mission of wildlife rehabilitators is to return injured birds to the sky, or the sea, or wherever it is they came from. En route, the teenagers were chatting away when suddenly I screamed “Eagles!”,

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Puffins Eggs Wildlife Rehabilitation Bald Eagle 274

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

who can be found regularly at the bird and wildlife blog Birdland West. However, he’s been known to share his perspicacious avian observations around the web, including right here! I didn’t know much about Flickers until I started volunteering at a wildlife rehabilitation center a couple of years ago.

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Woodpeckers Wildlife Rehabilitation Wildlife Seattle 225

10,000 Birds

MAY 25, 2011

Four several years, I’ve been a volunteer at a Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. I was pretty sure that this was not a baby bird — I wasn’t good enough then at identification to know what it was right away — but it was so sluggish I was afraid the cold might kill him if he stayed there any longer.

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Seattle Wildlife Rehabilitation Rescue Dogs 213

10,000 Birds

JULY 4, 2021

He found it in Gay Frazee , a skilled wildlife rehabber who runs Wildlife ER on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. She is one of only two rehabbers on a 70-mile peninsula right in the middle of the eastern flyway, a superhighway for migrating birds. He kept her supplied with minnows as he searched for help.

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Virginia Wildlife Transported Fish 264

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 13, 2013

This one was right next to the road, a location where they can usually be spotted at this refuge. Looking at the full crop and bloody leg… I think this falcon had just finished a meal and was just calmly watching the rest of the birds. While you’re there, go to our Facebook page and “Like Us.”

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Falcons Wildlife Sacramento Endangered Species 134

10,000 Birds

JULY 11, 2012

In responding to Suzie’s post defending wildlife rehabilitation I began to think again about the areas in which animal rights and animal welfare overlap with the field of conservation, and the ways in which they don’t. Animal rights is concerned with preventing the suffering or even use of animals by humans.

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Animal Rights Rights New Zealand Animal 263

10,000 Birds

JULY 20, 2019

The losses came from both wings, but the flaw is obvious on the right wing in the photo, below left.). Zickefoose documented the stages of the molt over its eighteen-day course, in her trademark watercolor painting (above right, starting at the bottom and going clockwise).

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Ohio Adoptable Emotional 2019 141

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 5, 2014

I recently traveled to Oklahoma to help spread the word of wildlife, finding all kinds of adventure along the way. Since wildlife rehabilitators are in short supply wherever you go, we tend to forge internet friendships; then the fact that our closest compatriots may live thousands of miles away isn’t such a problem. No matter.

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Tulsa Wildlife Rehabilitation Oklahoma Wildlife 183

10,000 Birds

MARCH 11, 2016

Luckily, she had no broken bones, but she did have a large open wound on her right wing. Unfortunately, in the meantime she broke the first six flight feathers on that right wing. Over the next months, it healed very well. She could fly, but was impaired. Now for the romance part of her story.

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New Mexico Wounded Owls Mexico 133

10,000 Birds

MARCH 25, 2016

One might say the heart of the person who wrote the flyer was in the right place. But they were abysmally ignorant, not only of the facts but of the damage that can be done by posting something so stupid. Predators have a hard enough time surviving without having to deal with the fallout from something they’re incapable of even doing.

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Pets Barn Owls Kentucky Bald Eagle 240

10,000 Birds

JULY 1, 2016

I was tempted to go on Facebook with guns blazing, but right now I am forced to pick and choose the timing of my battles. This was the wrong time to get into a public fight. My energy-saving strategy did not help me. At 2:00 that morning I paced furiously around my house, unable to fathom how mind-bogglingly cold and callous people can be.

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Cats Rabbits Chipmunks Pets 167

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 14, 2015

Putting a baby bird back in its nest is not always the right thing to do. Here are some examples of when a bird definitely needs your help and a call to a federally permitted bird rehabilitator is warranted. Unfortunately a bird’s nest location is not always perfect. So: When do you intervene?

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Wounded Rescue Medical Cats 256

10,000 Birds

JUNE 3, 2016

Daniel called his brother, Dylan, who called his friend Skye Horgan, whose mother is a wild bird rehabilitator (me). Do you see how these wildlife rescue stories go? Since I’m on bird sabbatical right now I called Lia Pignatelli, a very skilled songbird rehabber in Mohegan Lake. It takes a village.

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Rescue Transported Family Wildlife 113

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 5, 2012

On August 21st, Maryjane Angelo of Skye’s Spirit Wildlife Rehabilitation in Pennsylvania received a call from a man who said his nephew was standing in the middle of a rural road, guarding a Bald Eagle. People who say they have found an eagle have rarely found an eagle. Let him fly free for many years.” Please help!

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Bald Eagle Wildlife Rehabilitation Pennsylvania Eagles 246