What Matters the Most

Name: Rebekah Perry
Class Year: Junior
Hometown: Huntington, WV
Internship: Wildlife Rehabilitator at New Mexico Wildlife Center
Location: Espanola, New Mexico

Now that the rest of my summer has flown by extremely quick, and school is back in session, I wanted to take the time to unpack my internship experience from a completed point of view. What did I get out of being on the other side of the country for 10 weeks?

Wow. I become overwhelmed by the fullness of my time spent out west every time I start to decide what to write. Therefore, I think I might begin this post with sort of a "brain dump" of things that stick out about this summer, and then wrap them up into what I learned matters the most.

Something really interesting and very insightful that I got to do during my second half of the internship was work on a cost analysis project for some of the most common cases that came into the center. The goal of my research was to gather every cost that a patient admitted to the New Mexico Wildlife Center accumulates throughout its time there, beginning to release, and have that information to better inform the public of the astonishingly high prices of rehabilitation, so that they could then donate accordingly. Donations are the main source of funding for most wildlife centers, and many people do not realize the scope of how much each animal costs.  Did you know that the diet of just one orphaned baby bobcat, that must be kept for 7 months, is $1,172.12 ? Or that a group of six orphaned squirrels will eat $375.76 of food in 8 weeks? And who would have thought that just 5 tiny insectivorous songbirds will eat $140 worth of meal worms during their stay?

Another exciting part of the last half of my summer was getting to see many of the animals that we had worked with all summer long return home to the wild. Perhaps the most rewarding release to do was of the four stubborn and sassy barn owl siblings that had been raised successfully from abandoned hatchlings to independent adults in the time that we were there. After weeks of going from force feeding, to hand feeding, self feeding, and finally killing live prey in mouse school, the birds got to be released by all of us interns on the second to last week of our summer. We knew that when it took literally two hours to catch them all up out of their huge flight mew outside (because they were such good fliers escaping our nets and no longer dependent on our care) that they were going to do wonderfully in the wild.

But as always mentioned before, it was not all fun and games for the last five weeks. A very sobering feeling in the field of wildlife rehabilitation is when you realize that you cannot always afford to play hero all of the time. When money is tight and the patient load is full, sometimes animals come in too far gone to try and rescue. That lesson is a devastating one to learn, and every single heart in the clinic ached for the lives of those patients to live on, but great value did come from their souls passing: sometimes it takes rock hard reality to remind you why we as the human race really need to come together to defend and protect our wildlife through our actions, philanthropy, and educating others. One of our staff members had the idea to light a candle every time the life of an animal was put to rest, as a way of honoring them and acknowledging that they were missed.

So I promised that I would wrap all of this up with what I discovered matters the most. People. People are what matter the most. Now some of you might be like, "What? I thought you spent your whole entire summer saving wildlife? Shouldn't the animals matter the most?", and that is not necessarily what I am saying. Obviously the animals matter, and their conservation is the key reason that an organization like the New Mexico Wildlife Center exists. But their lives will never be conserved if people are not connected, and that connection can take many different forms. It can look like the incredible ICU staff dedicating the better half of their every single day to the critical care of animals that have been injured or orphaned in the area. It can also look like the hard working office manager answering phones for wildlife emergency calls and hosting guests. It looks like volunteers who come to take care of the animals used for public education and it looks like the education staff running kids camps and events. But it also looks like the little girl who called the center at about 7pm at night when I was working, who wasn't even old enough to know exactly what town she lived in, but knew when to realize that a baby bird had been orphaned, and informed me that she had been checking on it all day from her window to see if its parents would come back for it, and hadn't seen them. It also looks like a famous author who notices when his neighbors have shot a mother bobcat that had been caring for her two cubs in his back yard and then traps the cubs and brings them in to the center, and writes a very generous check for their funding and proceeds to use his position to tell his fan club to donate a certain sum to the NMWC in order to receive a signed copy of one of his books.

Wildlife Rehabilitation brings hope. Hope, not just for the animals that pass through, but for everyone involved. People, when banded together, can be a strong force for evil, or an invincible force for good. And in a world that sometimes looks hopeless and dark, we can band together to make a difference by conserving the lives and biodiversity of our wild neighbors, something that we all share a positive connection with. Wildlife rehabilitation can reshape the way people view the life of an animal, and their own lives as well. A second chance for all: we can make a real difference. We can choose to do good. That is what matters the most.