Wildlife Conservation United States Project #15809

Give Orphaned and Injured Wildlife a Second Chance

by Rockfish Wildlife Sanctuary, Inc.

Project Report | Sep 5, 2023
School's in Session at the Sanctuary

By Jeff Wilbur | Administrator

Kestrel Fledgling

It's late summer at Rockfish Wildlife Sanctuary, and just like the seasonal return to school for humans, it's time for school to begin here. Our patients don't exactly take math and social studies, though. They're enrolling in Mouse School! This rigorous yet not-so-academic program is our way of making sure an orphaned bird of prey in care at RWS can effectively hunt before release.

While each busy baby season at RWS brings its surprises, it's a given that we will care for a few orphaned raptor patients. This year, we have had the pleasure of caring for both Barred Owls and American Kestrels. Like most of our patients, nestling raptors start in our indoor nursery where they are cared for with daily monitoring and hand-feedings throughout the day. We limit our interactions with these sensitive patients to prevent habituation. These birds need to grow up thinking they're birds, not humans! To ensure this, we are silent and cover our entire faces while feeding them. We also ensure each baby has a conspecific (same-species), buddy, whether it's their nestmate or another lone orphan transferred in from a different wildlife center. While they await their buddy, we provide them with mirrors so they see "another" owl or kestrel throughout the day rather than getting used to humans.

Once the babies have started to self-feed and grow in their feathers, they move to one of RWS's spacious flight enclosures. We catch each patient once per week to ensure they're still hitting important growth milestones. To weigh them safely, we net the bird and wrap it securely in a towel for a few moments while we collect their weight - it might not be the most high-tech, but this "burrito" technique reduces the bird's stress and ensures we get the information we need quickly. Over time, the raptor patient grows large enough and flies effectively enough for it to be ready to attend Mouse School!

This process is the only time we ever incorporate live prey at RWS, but it is necessary: it serves as the "final exam" to ensure our Barred Owl and American Kestrel patients possess the crucial skills they need to survive in the wild. To set up Mouse School, we leave each patient alone in their flight enclosure, one at a time, with a large tub on the ground. The tub contains a few live feeder mice (never native mouse patients!) and plenty of food, water, nesting material, and hidey holes for the mice to escape to. We don't want our raptor patients to get an easy A+, after all. Criteria for passing is simple: we count how many mice are left the next day. If the bird has successfully caught and consumed at least one mouse, it passes with flying colors.

After graduating from Mouse School, our raptor patients are ready to return to the wild and serve as functioning members of our ecosystems.

Barred Owl

Owl Burrito for weighing

Owl in flight enclosure

Links:

http://RockfishWildlifeSanctuary.org

Permalink

May 10, 2023
Serendipity & Kit(tens)!

By Jeff Wilbur | Administrator

New Fox Enclosure

For the first time in a few years (thanks to COVID), we just finished constructing a new fox enclosure at the Sanctuary. Thanks to a grant for materials and the construction knowledge and manpower provided by Charlottesville's Building Goodness Foundation, we now have the Taj Mahal of Fox enclosures! Like the other fox enclosures, it is situated out in the woods on the Sanctuary's property but far away from the bulk of bustling Sanctuary activities. This privacy creates a calm and serene environment for our fox kits (notoriously high-stress patients) to grow up in. Constructed by volunteers over the course of many weekends, the spacious new fox enclosure will provide a safe home while still allowing for species-specific natural history behavior...like plenty of digging!

Serendipitously, the enclosure was finished just in time. So far in 2023, we have three times as many fox kits as last year - currently 18 and counting! Why so many this year? Well, each year is different with its own unique stories. For example, some of our kits this year came to RWS because a homeowner noticed the infant kits together in their backyard and thought they had stumbled upon a litter of domestic kittens. They put the kits in their barn, providing bowls of kitten formula, solid foods, and water for over a week before realizing they perhaps had a more wild situation on their hands. Red fox kits are born almost uniformly chocolate brown and just a tad bigger than a domestic cat – they look similar to a puppy or kitten. However, infant fox kits have a white-tipped tail and quickly develop a white spot on their chest, too. Their trademark red coat grows in after about one month. If you’re ever unsure what kind of animal you’re dealing with, reach out to a rehabber and ask! Rabies can be transmitted by both a bite and through saliva, so it was lucky for the kits that the rescuer used gloves and did not handle them directly. Had these kits been handled without gloves, the local health department could deem it necessary to test for rabies (a test that requires euthanasia). This is a lesson and a further reminder not to handle wildlife unless specifically instructed to by a permitted rehabilitator.

As for the kits now? They’re doing well at RWS, fully weaned onto solid foods, and already moved into our beautiful new fox enclosure. We aim to release the adorable litter in late July! All due to the support provided by our patrons and the wonderful work of volunteers and staff. Thank You.

Baby Fox Kit

Kits in Enclosure

Permalink

Jan 11, 2023
Winter Work at The Sanctuary

By Jeff Wilbur | Administrator

Fox kit in enclosure

The end of our busy baby season brings a much-needed respite to our staff but by no means brings the Sanctuary to a halt. Winter is a time to plan, prepare and get the facility ready to receive hundreds of next season’s patients! Ever-increasing patient numbers mean we need to have an ever-increasing supply of enclosures to handle them all. It also means that our current enclosures need to be kept in great shape despite the wear and tear of daily use and unpredictable weather.

Existing enclosures each get checked for loose lumber staples since the winter freeze-thaw cycles tend to push them out. Boards gnawed on by rodent patients – a natural part of rodent tooth care – get replaced. Wood that has warped over time to the point of hampering door use gets replaced too. On top of it all, each of our fifty outdoor enclosures undergoes deep cleaning and sanitation in preparation for the coming season.

We have some special projects happening at the Sanctuary this winter in particular. Because we care for over twenty orphaned striped skunk kits annually, we are re-designing our skunk enclosures to allow for more natural digging behavior. This includes excavating the enclosure floors and burying escape-proof mesh deeper so the stinky, adorable patients can dig and tunnel as they would in the wild. We are also expanding some of our fox enclosures to give growing red fox kits more room to roam around. We are even constructing one large, brand-new fox enclosure to meet the region’s high demand for fox rehabilitation! This endeavor requires extending our access road further into the woods because our fox enclosures are the farthest away from our main building. The distance from most activity allows the kits to grow in as much of a wild area as possible without being stressed by frequent human noises and interactions.

Because our enclosures are spaced throughout our rural 22-acre wooded property, we also must keep track of the condition of the forest that we inhabit. As the Sanctuary’s native trees grow and change, falling limbs and trunks present safety concerns for our enclosures and for our staff. This season, an arborist removed seven dead trees in danger of falling and harming our team. We left the dead trees on the property to ensure they could fulfill the next stage of a tree’s life cycle: providing a home and nutrition for ground-dwelling creatures, from natural bacteria and fungi to Virginia opossums.

While we tackle these many maintenance projects, we still care for our small squad of year-round residents. These are our education ambassador animals who live with us because they were medically or behaviorally non-releasable. We are also “overwintering” patients who arrived too late into the fall to be released safely before the start of winter. These wintertime patients include a nursery full of box turtles still recovering from car collisions, a few orphaned juvenile bats in our nursery’s makeshift hibernaculum, thirty eastern gray squirrels in outdoor enclosures, and a small litter of flying squirrels. Luckily, due to differing growth schedules, we can use our bat enclosure as a flying squirrel enclosure for the winter before their early spring release (and bat move-in). We’re all about adaptive reuse at RWS!

Sanctuary tree maintenance

Skunks eating in enclosure

Links:

Sanctuary Website

Permalink

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ›

About Project Reports

Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.

If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can recieve an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.