My Wildlife Rehabilitation Externship Reflection [Student Blog]

I became a wildlife rehabilitation extern to learn new skills about handling and caring for wildlife. I was a pre-veterinary student still trying to figure out which field of veterinary medicine was for me. I thought wildlife rehabilitation would be a nice break from the routine cat and dog appointments that I’ve been seeing for the past three years while working at small-animal veterinary clinics. Before the wildlife externship, I envisioned myself surrounded by adorable baby squirrels, bunnies, and birds like a modern-day Snow White and thought that it would be super rewarding to be the savior of these helpless little critters. And while this externship was rewarding, it was also full of challenges and was not a “break” by any means.

On my very first day, my expectations went out the window. After a tour of the facility, I was led into the kitchen to get a lesson on meal prep. One of the patients at the time was an adult bobcat that was hit by a car and ended up stuck in the car’s grille for a two-hour drive. When the (very startled) driver of the car found the bobcat in her car grille, she called for help. The bobcat miraculously survived, however, it had a broken jaw along with numerous other injuries. She could not eat solid foods due to her broken jaw and therefore had to be served blended dead rat every day. And there I was, the modern-day Snow White, chopping and skinning a dead rat and putting it into a blender on my first day as an extern. While I am in no way a princess, this activity definitely was pretty jarring at first. However, as time went on and I gained more experience with meal prep involving dead rodents, I slowly became more and more confident and comfortable blending this lovely meal for our bobcat. Over time, the bobcat recovered and her jaw healed. Eventually, she was released and she is now probably successfully hunting non-blended animals and avoiding cars at all costs.

Even though I got used to meal prep, it definitely wasn’t my favorite part of the externship. I still wouldn’t give up on my idealized vision of wildlife rehab, and continued to look forward to other tasks, like bottle-feeding orphaned baby mammals. However, I quickly learned that raising baby squirrels and opossums proved to be a challenging task as well. The first group of baby squirrels arrived at the end of March. All of the externs were swooning at how adorable they were and we would all switch off feeding them formula 4-5 times a day. Then another group of baby squirrels came in. And then another. Before I knew it, there were 30 baby squirrels in our ICU, all depending on us to eat, poop, and be cleaned. And while I will always think baby squirrels are cute, they become less cute when they are screaming at you for 10 hours while you are covered in poop and dried up formula. However, much like my experience with the bobcat, this got better over time. I got to slowly watch all of these tiny baby squirrels gain weight and get weaned off of formula, and I feel fulfilled knowing that I had a big part in raising these little terrors to eventually be released into the wild.

As much as I was surprised by the tasks that I had to complete during this externship, I still am happy that I completed it. Saving wildlife can be a gross and thankless job at times, but it can also be incredibly rewarding. The feeling of helping an innocent creature in peril is truly irreplaceable. I am completely in awe of the hardworking people that work at this Center and pour themselves into helping all of the injured and abandoned wildlife that would die otherwise. I learned skills in the handling and husbandry of a wide range of reptiles, mammals, and birds which will be incredibly useful in my future endeavors. I also learned new important things about myself, like that I can, in fact, become desensitized to blending dead rats.

--Ally
WCV Class of 2018

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