Carolina Wildlife

Sometimes the things you love and care about the most can be the most frustrating bits of your life.

For me, this issue came to a head on a July day earlier this summer – the heat index in my hometown of Irmo, South Carolina was 110 that day, and I was weighing a crow. Well, making an effort to weigh a crow. My coworker was steadying a bucket on a Weight Watchers scale while I chased Maggie (the crow hero of this story) around a wooden and chicken wire enclosure. I got Maggie as far as into the bucket and we both put our hands over her, but it took only seconds for the wing flapping to tip everything (and everyone) over. Frustrated and overwhelmed, we prepared for try number two. In the back of my mind I knew that there were doves that needed to be tube-fed an hour ago, opossum bedding to be changed (for everyone’s sake), a bird that needed a wing wrap and six others on antibiotics, chimney swifts that needed to be exercised for their release the next day, someone was at the door with a new patient, and the timer was going off to feed the nestlings.

Wildlife rehabilitation rides that fine line between meaningful, important work and some of the most desperately comedic situations that you can encounter. I found myself painstakingly feeding tiny baby opossums every four hours while good ol’ boys ran them over daily, nursing turtles back to health after being weed-whacked, chasing ducks around the break room, consoling crying strangers leaving orphaned babies at our door, and raising six crows from nestlings while hunters devoted weekends to killing hundreds of their cousins. Often it felt like swimming up a waterfall, and I was starting to get bogged down in the repetition of feeding the same nestlings every thirty minutes and dealing with the same angry questions from the uninformed public.

An older coworker with lots of experience in wildlife rehab realized my frustration and gave me some advice that has slowed me down on many occasions since: Focus on the release. The crutch of your life is not in filling out paperwork, sixteen feedings of the same birds in one shift, studying for AP tests, packing boxes at a food bank, or begging peers to sign a petition. The value of any work or service is the “release” – the feeding of a hungry belly, the realization of a concept, the overturning of an unjust law, a grateful smile, and, yes, watching a bird that had no chance of survival before you took responsibility for him fly into the sunshine. Even if we can’t take back every wrong that has been inflicted on our furred, feathered, and scaled friends by the human race, the point is that someone notices, someone cares, and someone is making efforts to change the world for the better. www.carolinawildlife.org

Michelle

P.S. I am super SUPER excited to meet of our new freshmen and transfers next week! I’m a peer group leader and I’ll be around all orientation week, so I’m looking forward to saying hello to each of you!