Wildlife Rehabilitation Then
and Now
Thirty years of Caring for Alabama’s Native
Wildlife
by Anne G. Miller, Executive Director, Alabama Wildlife Center
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This summer is my thirtieth
baby season as a wildlife rehabilitator. I have cared for so
many nestling hawks and owls, baby beavers, raccoons, spotted fawns,
songbirds, wading birds, wood ducklings and turtles, I’ve lost
 count!
I became involved in wildlife rehabilitation just as the profession was
just getting started. Up until then, there was nowhere you
could get help for a wild creature in trouble. The Birmingham Humane
Society was receiving all kinds of native wild animals that had been hit
by a car, or had been caught by a pet cat or dog, or had flown into a
glass window. They were getting lots of young wild animals too,
that had somehow
been separated from their parents. Humane Society Director Rodney Hale
saw that there was an urgent need for a special organization to help
native wildlife, because he knew they were not equipped to care for so
many kinds of animals. Rodney formed a group of volunteers to work on
starting a wildlife rehabilitation center for Birmingham, and he invited
me to join that group. |
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Thirty Years of Caring for Alabama’s Native Wildlife
Anne's Scrapbook
of Memories
Click here to visit Anne's Scrapbook! |
At the time I was a keeper at the
Birmingham Zoo. I was also an active environmentalist, working on the
Board of Directors of the Alabama Conservancy (now the Alabama
Environmental Council). I felt that we needed to make people aware of
the huge impact that human activity was having on our native wildlife.
Helping individual wild animals seemed like an excellent way to arouse
community awareness and concern for all native wildlife. I knew
right away that the new profession of wildlife rehabilitation was the
cause to which I would dedicate the rest of my life.
When I compare those early baby seasons with our current baby
(Photo of flight cage by Marcia Perry) |
To
begin with, we had nothing to work with. Facilities consisted of spare
bedrooms and old farm sheds. Every time a new species of orphan
arrived, we had to improvise another cage and research the ingredients
for formulas and diets. There were so many questions we knew we had to
find answers to: if a particular species of migratory bird was injured
in the fall, could we release it during the winter, or did we have to
hold on to it until spring? What kind of special training did a young
hawk need before it could be released to the wild? 
There
were only a few volunteers at that time, and we were always stretched to
the limit. This picture was taken in about 1981 by Cameron McDonald
(now Cameron Vowell). I had called her in desperation and asked her to
help me get this primitive bottle rack fastened to the fence so the
fawns would not have so much human contact. (Everybody I knew was
likely to be asked to help somehow!)
season,
the contrast is almost unbelievable. Now the Alabama Wildlife
Center has bird and mammal nurseries with incubators and special housing
appropriate for each stage of development. Highly trained interns and
volunteers staff the Center 13 hours a day, 365 days a year, using the
latest information on diets, housing and behavior of over 100 species of
wild
creatures.
Spacious flight cages and enclosures allow us to care for a host of
different species. We’re still under-funded, under-staffed, and
stretched to the limit, but the animals get a lot better care than they
did 30 years ago.